The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no great variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard from nine o’clock till one, that their backs ached and they lost all sense of the passage of time. Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness, so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his hands. Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked and her invincible good humour. Edwin found that she could teach him more than his male superiority would ever have dreamed.

Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began to seem more simple. Bandages, that had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles, or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to fold themselves in symmetrical designs. Edwin and W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed at first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform, now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity.

Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually, from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities began to emerge and even intimacies that were flattering because they implied a trust in his own imperfect skill.

He did not know the names of his patients any more than they knew his. To him they were grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he was always “Doctor”; but the thing that made them human and lovable to him was the sense of their dependence on him; and the preference for his attentions that was sometimes timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper than any he had ever known. It pleased him to think that it was true when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently than the other workers in the casualty department. Such confidences almost convinced him that he had found a vocation.

After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases together in the lounge of the Dousita. Maskew, who still met them every day at this resort, found their conversation boring, and fell back more and more upon the charms of Miss Wheeler, who did not seem to have varied by a single hairpin since the day of their first acquaintance. And from the discussion of their individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more general questions that their work aroused.

“This life’s worth living,” he would say. “When you first take up medicine and spend a couple of years over learning the atomic weights of heavy metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to wonder what the devil you’re getting at; by Gad, this hospital work opens your eyes. You’re doing something practical. What’s more, you’re doing a job that no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see the actual results of your treatment on your patients.”

“Thank God, I’m not one of them, W.G.,” said Maskew morosely. “As a matter of fact, it’s no more than when an electrical engineer finds a short circuit and makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job of a rickety staircase.”

“That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said W.G. “In our job you’re dealing with human life; you’re relieving physical pain—and sometimes you get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And you’ve a responsibility too. If you make a slip the poor devil you’re experimenting on is going to suffer. You may even kill him. And the extraordinary thing is that he trusts you . . .”

To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and, indeed, the most pathetic. It showed him that the practice of medicine imposed an actual moral discipline on those who followed it: an obligation of the most meticulous honour and devotion. But if the discipline of practice demanded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his reward not only in the thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or “bad legs,” as they called them, he dressed, but in the rarer consciousness of actual achievement which came to him more frequently as the scope of his work extended.

One case in particular he always remembered, principally because it was the first of the kind. She was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at piecework in some sweater’s den in the rookeries on the southern side of the hospital. She was not beautiful. Her face had the peculiar ivory pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants that have sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were made callous by the plucking of threads and rough with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped. A week or so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected needle, and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She had to live, poor thing! and so, for a week she had worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew tense and shiny with compression, and the pain would not let her sleep. At last, when she could work no longer, she had come to the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, and was very near to tears.