—Wordsworth.
One lovely autumn evening, just five years after Elsworth went to Spain, two Englishmen were chatting over their wine in the dining-room of the Hotel de los Siete Suelos in the grounds of the Alhambra at Granada, under the red towers of that fairy palace of the Moors. The elder was an exceedingly handsome man of fifty or thereabouts, of commanding presence, a fine, open, honest, intelligent countenance, a voice all suavity and of soothing modulation and persuasive power, he looked every inch the sort of person he was—a fashionable West-End physician, whose clientèle was mostly composed of ladies.
Dr. Garnett Graves, lecturer on gynæcology at St. Bernard’s Hospital, was taking his holiday in Spain this year. His companion was his colleague at the same place—Mr. Malthus Crowe. They were taking their long vacation trip together, and had remained a few days longer at Granada than they had originally intended, because news had reached them that two ladies of their acquaintance were on their way home to England and would take Granada en route. It was of these ladies, expected to arrive by the evening train from Malaga, that these gentlemen were speaking. The talk was of money, and the prospects of the heiress.
Mr. Crowe we know; his companion needs some introduction. He was not a very scientific man, but withal a most successful physician. He managed somehow to do his patients a great deal of good, yet as he did not always know exactly why, some of his colleagues did not see the benefit of it, though the patients certainly did not offer any objection to the cure on this account. His colleagues did not exactly go the length of saying that the patients ought to have refused to be cured on such unscientific conditions; for as their contempt for the mental powers of patients in general was immeasurable, they probably thought them capable of any unscientific meanness. So Dr. Graves was not very popular with the younger and ultra-scientific members of St. Bernard’s staff, though his out-patient waiting-rooms were always crowded with suffering human beings, whose gratitude for his kindly, and generally efficient, help was unbounded. The students liked him and valued his teaching—that is, the younger ones did; but when they had been long enough at the hospital, they, too, came to see that a cure on unscientific grounds and upon doubtful principles was no cure at all; so they pitied his ignorance and turned elsewhere for knowledge.
Mr. Crowe would not have been out of his suitable environment in this very city of Granada had he happened to have been born in Isabella the Catholic’s time. Perhaps he would have made, in some respects, an excellent Inquisitor. Certainly he would have done well for one of the doctors who had to stand in the torture-room to say exactly how much more pain the victim could bear. The days of the Inquisition being run out, Mr. Crowe, as we said, would have been a square man in a round hole if the science of physiology had not demanded an expositor.
They were talking, these two doctors, at the Alhambra Hotel, about the only daughter and the orphan child of the great Sir Martin Lee, late consulting physician to St. Bernard’s, who had amassed enormous wealth by the practice of his profession, and recently dying, had left no less a sum than two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to his daughter, beside great legacies to friends and public institutions, amongst which St. Bernard’s came in for its share.
Known to both of the speakers of course was Mildred Lee, who, with her aunt, was expected that night to arrive in Granada, and would then with the two doctors continue the journey homewards.
Mr. Crowe had been a constant visitor at her father’s house, for Sir Martin had great sympathy with his physiological tastes; and though certainly not an original investigator himself, having a more profitable occupation as a fashionable physician, he found it very useful, and even necessary, to keep well ahead with all the research of the day, and to have the reputation for the highest scientific method. When he cured people, he always knew exactly the reason why; but he cured the patient first, and found the reason afterwards. At least, he always maintained that he did this, and never omitted to give the happy patient a popular little lecture on the subject, which sent him, or her, away not only disburdened of the ailment, but conscious of the delightful reflection that his case was an interesting contribution to clinical medicine and its cure the outcome of the study of practical physiology. For a great deal of this Sir Martin Lee sucked the brains of Mr. Crowe, who in his turn found his profit in the transaction, as he, being a surgeon, was often recommended by his more celebrated friend where the patient’s case was not a medical one. Dr. Graves, not being so ardent a devotee of science, and finding no such necessity for assuming a virtue he did not possess, had seldom visited the house in question. A great hospital, with its large medical school, its staff of professors, its physicians, surgeons, assistant physicians and assistant surgeons, its nursing sisters, nurses, dressers, and students, makes up a world in itself, of which the interests, occupations, and pursuits seem to those engaged in it to be almost the only ones of any consequence to them. They must feel this absorbing interest in all that belongs to it, or they would not be fit for their work, and could not continue it efficiently. The study of medicine demands, perhaps, a more complete sacrifice of the whole man than any other profession, except that of the Christian priesthood. To be a competent doctor at all, one must feel an overwhelming interest in the mysteries of health and disease. To be a distinguished doctor the interest must become a lifelong passion; and this, alas! too often closes in the mind of its possessor against the access of any other of the enthusiasms that lay hold of men.
Neither the Church nor the Bar demands so much of its disciples as does Medicine. They allow far more scope for the pursuit of letters than the healing art. We expect a clergyman or a barrister to be a literary man. We are surprised if the doctor, by stealing some hours from his daily avocations, attains even moderate eminence in the path of literature.
“A quarter of a million!” exclaimed Mr. Crowe, as he carved another slice of melon.