Hospital Memoranda, Sept. 21st.
—Private William Carter, æt. 24; admitted a week to-day. Gastric fever—typhoid form—slight delirium—bad case. Asked me to write to his mother—did not say where. Mem. to enquire among his division if anything is known about his friends.
Corporal Thomas Hardman, æt. 50—Delirium tremens—mending. Knew him in the Crimea, when he was a perfectly sober fellow, with constitution of iron. “Trench work did it,” he says, “and last winter's idleness.” Mem. to send for him after his discharge from hospital, and see what can be done; also to see that decent body, his wife, after my rounds tomorrow.
M. U.—Max Urquhart.—Max Urquhart, M.D., M.R.C.S.
—Who keeps scribbling his name up and down this page like a silly school-boy, just for want of something to do.
Something to do! Never for these twenty years and more have I been so totally without occupation.
What a place this camp is! worse than ours in the Crimea, by far. To-day especially. Rain pouring, wind howling, mud ancle-deep; nothing on earth for me to be, to do, or to suffer, except—yes! there is something to suffer—Treherne's eternal flute.
Faith, I must be very hard up for occupation when I thus continue this journal of my cases into a personal diary of the worst patient I have to deal with—the most thankless, unsatisfactory, and unkindly. Physician, heal thyself! But how?
I shall tear out this page,—or stay, I'll keep it as a remarkable literary and psychological fact—and go on with my article on Gunshot Wounds.