CHAPTER IV.
HIS ’PRENTICE HAND.
Knowledge after all, is not the greatest thing in life; it is not the “be-all and the end-all” here. Life is not science. The moral nature of man is more sacred in my eyes than his intellectual nature. Goodness, lovingness, and quiet self-sacrifice are worth all the talents in the world.—G. H. Lewes.
The comfort or the misery of many families may probably hang upon the notions that each of you will carry from this place.—Sir Thomas Watson.
But Lindsay Street was not wholly inhabited by the idlers. There were many men who led solitary lives at their lodgings, and worked night and day at books or bed side. Some took portions of their subjects home to dissect, and the back gardens at their lodgings were often used as places of sepulture for brains, hands, or as Tom Hood sings,—
“Those little feet that used to look so pretty.
There’s one I know in Bunhill Row, the other’s in the City.”
Maternity cases were attended by the junior students at the homes of the patients within a radius of two miles of the hospital. This served to bring them into direct contact with the poor, and familiarized them with scenes of the most horrible destitution in the filthiest and lowest slums of the metropolis. The young men were usually favourites with the people, who are always taken with the free and easy, the good-humoured and generous behaviour of medical students, anxious to improve their own knowledge of work which will be of the greatest importance to them in their future career, and glad to render their—sometimes very far from skilled—services to uncomplaining poverty, with a view to getting their papers signed for the colleges, which demand a definite amount of this work to be performed while in connection with their medical school. It was hourly enforced upon them that such was their only chance of the free and unrestricted use of human “material” for acquiring this sort of information. Their blunders, their negligences, would not count against them whilst in a state of pupilage. A great city, a poverty-stricken population, a benevolent public, and the custom of their profession, had placed at their disposal an immense amount of raw material, unbounded facilities for picking up knowledge, and the deft use of mysterious and complicated instruments. This skill, this dexterous use of the tools of their art, would shortly enable them to earn a handsome living. Let, then, every moment be devoted to obtaining that knowledge at the cost of ignorant and uncomplaining patients who would only see in their attentions the desire of a charitable young gentleman to help them, just as the visiting lady and the clergyman helped them efficiently. Let, then, every day and every case enable them to use more skilfully, under such clinical conditions, those tools the awkward use of which would inevitably be detected in the higher walks of their art to which they are progressing. Such is the admirable way in which the highest skill and wisdom of medicine is combined with the attempts of the novices to attain it in the practice of the hospitals, that the shortcomings and feeble efforts of the learners are glorified and ennobled by the brilliant successes of the teachers, till the mistakes are lost sight of in the dazzling triumphs of their achievements. It is like the Catholic doctrine of works of supererogation. St. Francis Xavier was so much better than he had any occasion to be, that he had a fund of merit at his disposal for helping the deficiencies of those who fell short in their good works.
A great surgeon achieves a brilliant success in an operation which sends a man away from the wards to his own home restored in health and limbs to his family and his work. It is the hospital which gets the credit, and the credit is sufficient to atone for many of the maimings and other unfortunate terminations of a score of cases, which are looked upon as failures, not of much greater consequence than Beau Brummel’s cravats cast aside on his dressing-table. It will not do to be too hard on the failures. Even Professor Holloway did not publish them. The advertisements of quack and royal surgeon are alike in this respect at least, that they do not go into any such unnecessary details!
But oh, the spoiled cravats! condemned to drag out a wretched existence because they had the misfortune to be not only ignorant, and poor, and powerless, but waste material used by St. Bernard’s in the attempt to make of any person able to pay its fees a competent healer of diseases. Not enough was it that they were born into a hard and cruel world, heavily handicapped by feeble frames and badly developed brains, without education or any of the means of lifting themselves from the slough of their environments, but it was also required of them by our advanced civilization that they should yield up their poor bodies, which were enough like better people’s frames for the purpose, to become “teaching stuff” for classes at a medical school.