The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine, like the humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum.

The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of self-protection.

It happened in this way. During the early part of his second year Edwin had become conscious of a new figure in the dissecting room, that of a man named Boyce, a student with a brilliant reputation who had managed in some inexplicable way to fail in his first examination and be left behind by the other men of his year. He was a tall, fair creature, with a long face and small, very blue eyes. The society of Alvaston had made him friendly with Martin, from whom Edwin’s new relations were gradually separating him. The only characteristic that Edwin had so far noticed in Boyce was an almost literary fluency in the use of foul language which left even Harrop gasping. Boyce was working alone on a thorax a few tables away from Edwin. He was a neat and laborious dissector, and Edwin had been tempted to admire the skill with which he had defined the network of blood-vessels, the system of coronary arteries and veins, with which the human heart is enmeshed. Boyce was evidently far less unapproachable than Edwin had imagined, and while they were examining his dissection together they had not noticed the approach of Dr. Moon, who had walked slowly to their table and stood gazing at the specimen through his moonlike pince-nez. They did not realise that he was near them until they heard his voice, slowly intoning a line of poetry. “The heart,” he said: “arras’d in purple like a house of kings. Are you acquainted with that line, Mr. Boyce?”

“No, sir. Who wrote it?”

“A man named Francis Thompson. He was a medical student at Manchester, several years senior to me.”

“Oh, I know his name,” said Boyce. “He is a friend of my father’s.”

“A great poet,” said Bobby solemnly. “A great poet. The contemplation of mortality in this place should be full of poetical reflections. You see, this is the heart of a very old or a very dissolute man. The coronary arteries are stiff with atheroma.”

“I was thinking, sir,” said Edwin, encouraged, “of the heart of Shelley that Trelawny was supposed to have picked out of the funeral pyre when the body was burned. His account says that only the heart was left. He gave it to Hunt, didn’t he? But you’d think the heart would be burned more easily—”

“Yes. . . . It’s an unlikely story. Shelley’s heart”—he looked up dreamily at the ceiling—“Shelley’s heart. . . . It’s a strange reflection.” And he moved away, his big head still in the air and his hands behind his back.

“I say,” said Edwin; “I’d no idea Bobby was like that. You wouldn’t associate him with poetry, would you? He seems such an awfully matter-of-fact chap. Dry bones, you know.”