The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Come along, then.” Martin opened the door of the dissecting room and held it while Edwin entered. It was a long, irregular chamber, with a low glass roof and an asphalt floor. Edwin’s first impression was one of light and space: the second, of a penetrating odour unlike anything that he had smelt before. He could not give a name to it, and indeed it was complex, being compact of a pungent, unknown antiseptic and another fainter smell that was, in fact, that of ancient mortality. The effect of the whole was strange but not nauseating as he would have expected. All down the room at short intervals long zinc tables, with a tin bucket at the head of each, were ranged. Most of the tables were empty; but on four or five of them “subjects” were either displayed or lay draped in coarse, unbleached calico. One or two of them sprawled on their faces, but most of them, being as yet unappropriated, were supported under their backs by small metal platforms from which the heads rolled back and the limbs were stretched out in a posture of extreme but petrified agony. To Edwin’s eyes it was a lamentable and terrible sight. He wondered by what chain of degradations the body of a man who had lived and known the youth and pride of body that he himself possessed, who had experienced aspirations and dreams and hope and love, should descend to this final indignity. He stood still. He did not dare, for the moment, to come nearer.

“How do they get here?” he asked Martin.

“Oh, they’re paupers, you know. Old men and women, most of them, who die in the workhouses and are not claimed by their relatives. Instead of burying them they send them along here. The anatomy porters collect them. Then they’re pickled for so long in a kind of vat in the cellars of this place, and they inject them with arsenic to preserve them, and pump red paint into their arteries so that they’re easier to dissect. I shouldn’t like the job myself; but I suppose the porters are used to it. You get used to anything, you know. Besides, they aren’t a bit like they are when they’re first dead. I think that’s the chap for us. I had a look at him the other day. It’s always better to choose an old one. The muscles are cleaner. Less work.”

They approached the second table. The subject was an old and withered man: his grey hair was shaven, and his mouth hung open, showing that he had lost his teeth. Martin had been quite right. He didn’t look in the least like a dead man. He did not look like a man at all: only a pathetic, tanned skeleton with tight-drawn sinews and toughened skin: a dried mummy, from which all the contours of humanity had shrunk away. It wasn’t so bad after all. The picture that Edwin’s imagination had anticipated, that of a crude and horrible human shambles, was not here. No . . . the idea of humanity was too remote to be in the least insistent. For a moment, in spite of this consolation, Edwin went pale. Martin noticed it.

“I say, this isn’t going to turn you up, is it?”

“No. . . . I’m all right. I was only . . . thinking.”

“Thinking?” said Martin, with a laugh. “I shouldn’t do too much of that if I were you. We’d better make a start to-morrow on the right Upper. I’ll put our names down.”

He turned towards the glass case in which hung notices of lectures and the printed cards on which the names of dissectors were recorded, and while he did so Edwin still stood thinking. He thought: Was this really a man who had lived and breathed and aged and suffered? Where had he been born? How long ago? Had he ever loved? Had he ever married? Had he ever wondered what the future would bring to him? surely his fancies had never envisaged this. Perhaps he had been born in some remote hamlet of the marches, some sweet smelling village like Far Forest, from which the iron tentacles of the city had drawn him inwards and sapped his life, leaving, in the end, this dry shell, like the sucked carcass of a fly blowing in a spider’s web. If this were the end of poverty and desolation, what a terrible thing poverty must be. Did the poor and the outcast ever dream that they might come to this? And yet, after all, what did it matter? . . .

He awoke from his dream. It was evident that he was the only dreamer in that long room. At many of the other tables second year men were sitting quietly dissecting or gossiping or thumbing manuals of practical anatomy yellow with human grease. It amazed him that men should be able to joke and smoke their pipes and appear to be contented in such an atmosphere; but the wisdom of Martin’s phrase returned to him: “You get used to anything, you know.”

Among the dissectors already at work in their white overalls, he saw the ponderous frame of the man called Brown. He, at any rate, was not letting the grass grow under his feet. Already he was engaged in reflecting the skin from the “Lower” on which he was working. His clumsy hands found the work difficult, as was shown by the anxiety of his partner, an immaculate smooth young man, whom Edwin already knew by the name of Maskew, dressed in the Major’s indispensable navy serge reefer, with the correct red tie and a big orchid in his buttonhole. He took an elaborate meerschaum pipe out of his mouth to protest:—