The winter session had commenced about a month; the lecturers had all returned to their posts and patients, and the work at St. Bernard’s was again in full swing. In all the wards you heard little hints, jokes, and anecdotes of the holiday tours and adventures of the doctors—very impressive to the students, very suggestive of the good things in store for them when they had made their mark and could take expensive trips. The poor assistant surgeons and physicians had been compelled to stick to their work all through the vacation, and heard with rather mitigated relish the stories told by their chiefs of Norway, Switzerland, Italy, or Spain.
Mr. Crowe was full of the latter country, and the backward condition of everything there. He found nothing doing of importance for research but some Pasteur inoculations. He had visited many of the Spanish hospitals and schools of medicine, but everything was backward in comparison with France or Germany. Tho Spaniards, he thought, were unwilling to embrace the new theories which were helping the world forward. He had only met three physiologists who lived up to the true ideal of a modern scientist. One at Salamanca, who, having discovered the bacillus of phthisis in the sputa of a patient, had inoculated with the germs one of his own children several times, with a view to watching the rise and progress of the disease. Another at Valladolid had carried out a long series of experiments in brain localisation on a mule-driver who had fallen over a precipice, and was taken to the hospital with a portion of his brain exposed so conveniently that it could be galvanised as readily as one of Professor Ferrier’s monkeys, and was consequently a most valuable means of confirming that gentleman’s theories. The third he met at Madrid, and he had done wonders at his hospital by ordering a number of his patients, who were either cooks or butchers, to eat daily a portion of raw beef (persons of these professions are usually quite ready to do this), for the purpose of introducing into their systems the parasite Tænia mediocanellata.
As epilepsy, hysteria, convulsions, and even insanity have been known to follow the introduction of this interesting parasite into the human body, it must be admitted that Professor Montijo was one of the heroic school, and merited all Mr. Crowe’s eulogiums. Some of the alumni who listened to these accounts of continental practice thought that the first man was the only true hero of the lot. He, Abraham-like, had been willing to sacrifice his own son “for the good of humanity.” As for the mule-driver and his exposed brain, they had done quite as good things at St. Bernard’s more than once; while in regard to the hydatid and tape-worm germs in beef and pork, that was an every-day business down in the out-patient department, and a very meek sort of experiment for a St. Bernard’s man.
Dr. Stanforth told his class a good thing from Milan, where a tremendous experiment, involving risk to the lives of several women, had been tried by a friend of his at the Maternity Hospital. He admitted it was rather hard on the women, who had sought the comforts of the hospital for quite other reasons; but it was a point which needed clearing up, and the learned professor, with the unwitting assistance of eight patients (and eight other lives especially protected by the laws of God and man, he forgot to add), had settled the question on behalf of therapeutics for ever.
“This is the heroic work we need so much in England. They are not nearly so timid in other countries as we are. We must have a policy of ‘thorough,’ or we shall be left behind.” And he set his lips firmly, and looked as though henceforth his patients were going to have “a bad time.”
Mr. Mole was doing all his little best to bring about this scientific millennium, but just then was not able to produce the results of his work, as the time was not ripe for his revelations.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE TRIUMPH OF MR. MOLE.
There came a respite to her pain;
She from her prison fled.—Wordsworth.