The hospital education of the present day is mere craftsmanship, and should only be permitted in conjunction with a liberal university training. The man who knows medicine and surgery only, however well he may know both, has only half learned the business of a doctor.
The old custom of serving an apprenticeship to a general practitioner had many advantages. Hospital work is so different from that in the outer world in which the student will have to practise, that he is only half educated when his curriculum is finished, and his diploma obtained. One acquires a certain wholesale business air in dealing with patients while attending the hospitals which is particularly objectionable to patients in general; and till a man has had considerable contact with private patients, he is far too rough and ready in the sick-room to be very welcome there. Our every-day complaints, it is evident, do not particularly interest him. He has been dealing with “cases as is cases; none of your trumpery family doctor business,” as Podger said. He has no respect for the miserable creature who has only bruised himself, not fractured anything; or whose mind is disturbed by family troubles and so misses his sleep, instead of being the subject of the vastly more interesting cerebral disease. In the latter case there is something pretty for his ophthalmoscope; in the former your eyes are not worth looking at. He has got hold of the notion that there can be nothing at all the matter with you if you have no “physical signs.” For your true scientist rejects the imagination. He wants facts he can handle and see. At heart he is a mere mechanic; he must open the frog’s thorax, and actually see the heart beating; must see with his own eyes the way carbonic acid acts on the living blood corpuscle. When completely imbued with this spirit, as the human mind can only entertain one great idea at a time, he acquires a sovereign contempt for the men who imagine merely, and do not see, taste, handle, and feel.
Linda had given herself up to the Socialist propaganda, and had quite resolved to waste no part of her life in love affairs. “It was quite time,” she declared, “that women should begin the work of setting to rights a world that men had so grievously muddled up.” She had often said more unwise things than this. She was, moreover, quite sincere, and had refused several very eligible offers for her hand. A bright-eyed, graceful woman like Linda, with her undoubted intellectual powers and her nice little fortune, would naturally have had offers before she reached her twenty-eighth year; but she loved the new gospel, and honestly thought it her duty “to war against the Jahveh worship introduced by a tribe of wandering Semites, and to substitute the evangel of Humanity for the code of Sinai.” There are plenty of such people about. It is not only the followers of Christ who sacrifice their lives and substance for their faith; His enemies do that, and do it honestly enough in their way. Were these people enemies of Christ? They did not think so. They maintained that the greatest Socialist who ever lived was Jesus of Nazareth, that He would have really conquered the world had not the Church conquered Him.
Elsworth was not in love with Linda in any true sense. He was attracted towards her by her brilliancy, wit, and mental powers. She was not beautiful if you analysed her form and features,—not one of the latter would have passed muster with an artist; yet, taken altogether, with intellect and grace beaming from her eyes, and influencing every movement, she was just the woman a clever man would fall in love with while in her presence. But this love would not last long. Clever men are usually held in bondage by coarser fetters than those of intellect. Girton or Newham are not at all the places one would go to for the purpose of seeking a wife: they can want no very high walls at either to keep Romeo out. As this is not a love story, we do not propose to analyse very minutely the sentiments that drew these young people towards each other. Perhaps it is quite enough to say that Elsworth was attracted by the very efforts she used to demolish the principles he had brought to his hospital career. He felt that Christianity was not intellectual enough for Western notions, however, it might include the highest modern ideas of philanthropy. In face of that young girl and her brother, he lacked the courage to take upon him the offence of the Cross. Peter denied his master at a maid-servant’s question. Linda had vanquished our young surgeon’s faith.
The athlete glories in his strength, the boisterous health of a well-knit frame requires an outlet; hence the periodical rowdyism which attacks students everywhere, especially those in training for callings that will repress their ardents spirits all too soon. With Tom Lennard and little Murphy, Elsworth was now almost nightly engaged in some wild frolic or other. A curious mixture was in him—half hero, half imp; at times he was given to periods of deep meditation on the highest matters that can interest mankind, to speculation on questions which have agitated the minds of philosophers, with a deep under-current of poetry running through his soul. Yet with all this there was a surface hot-headed foolishness which he neglected to restrain, leading him, at the suggestion of the moment, into outrageous acts of purposeless folly, if fun could be extracted from it. He wanted one thing—
“Discrimination—nicer power man needs
To rule him than is bred of bone and thew.”
Ever some new madness was attempted, some scandal enacted. The favourite amusement just then was disturbing music-halls and theatres, bar-rooms, and supper places in the West. The public seemed rather to like the students’ riots, and the proprietors condoned for money compensation what the police were only too anxious to punish.
One proprietor of a large and popular place of amusement did not see these disturbances in just this amiable light, and had recently caught and punished several young medicos who had made themselves obnoxious to him. It was determined very secretly to combine the fighting men of several hospitals into one grand attack on this man’s property.