The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

It was a long business, for the neglected pressure had impaired the vitality of the bone and the wound would not heal until the dead spicules had been separated from the living tissue. Edwin dressed the finger every morning. The patient would have been a poor subject at the best of times, and he knew that the fact that she was now out of work probably meant that she was starving. It would have been easy for him to tell her that she must have plenty of nourishing food; but he knew well enough that the words would have been no more than a mockery. In the hospital wards, he reflected, she might have been well fed; but the wards at the Prince’s were full of more serious cases who could not walk to the hospital to receive their treatment. On occasions of this kind he wished that he were a millionaire: an extravagant idea—for doctors are never millionaires. He could only ram iron into her and dress her and try to get her well so that she might travel back around the vicious circle to the conditions that had been responsible for her illness. It seemed to him that people who were not doctors could never really know anything about life.

In a little while there were others, many of them, in whose cases he knew that he had been privileged to effect some positive good: notably an old woman, always dressed in black and loaded with crepe as though she were attending her own funeral, who had fractured her wrist by slipping on an icy pavement one evening when she was fetching her husband’s supper beer, an office that she appeared far too ladylike ever to have performed. She had put out her hand to save herself, and a Colles fracture of the ulna and radius had been the result.

She called Edwin “My dear,” and the first thing that he noticed about her was the amazing cleanliness of her withered skin. He remembered the fortitude that she had shown when first he reduced the fracture; how her bony fingers, on one of which was a wedding ring worn very thin, had clasped his. For some curious reason he felt very tenderly towards her, and when the bones were set and he had passed her on to the massage department, he felt quite lost without her early “Good-morning!” That was another strange thing about medical practice: the way in which people with whom he was thrown into an intimate sympathy for a few days passed completely and irrevocably out of his life.

W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they took turns to visit the casualty department in the afternoons when the work was light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free hand in the performance of minor surgery. At this time of the day the work of the department was more suggestive of its name; for the people who came there were nearly all the victims of sudden illness or accident that needed diagnosis and immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from lectures in suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day and suffering the mingled emotions of pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infrequently the last . . . for he saw so much suffering that might easily have been prevented but for the ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion that a doctor is most wise to suppress.

Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would enter in a state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia.

“Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you come up before?” he would ask indignantly.

“The neighbours said it was only the teething, doctor,” she would reply.

Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the neighbours upside down. “Surely you could see the child was ill?” he would say.

“Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There’s seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going with another, and the house looking like a pigsty, and the master’s dinner to cook. I haven’t got no time to spare for hospitals.”

And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting himself, as he filled in the form for admission to the children’s ward, with telling her that the diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight months old.