The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Oh, I’m not talking about love,” said W.G. “I’m talking about a fellow’s ordinary physical needs. Being in love is not the same thing as that.”

“It is usually,” said the cynical Maskew.

“It’s all a ridiculous mix-up,” said Edwin. “Thank God it doesn’t worry us.”

II

With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real.

In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall and inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister spider.

He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and consistency of leather.

In Bobby’s demonstrations there was neither imagination nor romance: they were merely fascinating in virtue of the amazing exactitude of the detail which his brain had acquired through long familiarity with the dismembered fragments of humanity. There was nothing in the way of minute observation that could escape him, and his questions were so searching and unexpected that even Maskew, who had himself a prodigious memory for minute detail and could carry the letter of a textbook in his head, was constantly floored by them. It was a magnificent stimulus to Edwin; for it became a kind of game to master a part so thoroughly that Bobby could not stump him.

By this time he was so used to railway travelling that between the morning discussion of the progress of the war that had just broken out in South Africa, and the appearance of halfpenny papers, that multiplied like greenfly in this heated atmosphere, he could read his text-books of anatomy in a crowded carriage without disturbance apart from the natural curiosity that a vision of luridly coloured diagrams awakened in the minds of his fellow passengers, and particularly the bank clerk, who thirsted in a way that W.G. would have approved for technical instruction in the matter of certain organs. Edwin prepared himself for the demonstrator’s tutorials as rigorously as if he had been approaching a vital examination; he spent long hours in his bedroom, utterly heedless of his wide prospect of wintry fields, thinking of nothing but his collection of bleached bones, now carefully marked with coloured chalks to show the origins and insertions of muscles, and particularly those intricate fretted plates that are joined to form the fragile casket of the human skull.

So engrossed was he in absorbing the mere details of their physical form that his mind had no room for other speculations of the kind that had impressed him in the days of his first acquaintance with anatomy. It never struck him that the articulated skull which grinned at him from his mantelpiece when he woke each morning, had once contained the convolutions of a human brain: a mass of pulpy matter that had been the origin of strange complications of movement and feeling and thought, the storehouse of memories, the spring of passions and the theatre of dreams. He did not even know if the skull were that of a man or a woman. To him it was no more than an assembly of dry bones, intricate in their relations with one another, pierced by the foramina of bewildering nerves and blood-vessels, all of which must be visualised and stored and remembered within the limits of another structure of the same kind—the sutures and eminences of which he could feel with his own fingers when he rubbed his puzzled head.