The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“Take the baby along to ward fourteen,” he would say, “they’ll do what they can for it,” and be met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die it wasn’t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty?—the last words sinking to a maternal coo and being accompanied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby’s lips that were already blue for want of breath. And then Edwin would control his indignation and resort to wheedling and coaxing, feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.

Indeed, the responsibilities of his calling and its immense obligations impressed themselves on him more deeply every day. He saw that this profession of medicine was not to be taken lightly; that his work in it would be useless, almost impious, if it were not religiously performed. Even from the earliest ages this had been so. One day, idly reading a back number of the Lancet, he came upon a historical article that contained a translation of the Hippocratic oath, which had been administered to all those who were initiated in the mysteries of medicine two thousand years ago. It seemed to him that it might have been written on the day that he read it. Thus it ran:—

“I swear by Apollo the Healer, and Æsculapius, and Hygieia, and Panacea; and I call all Gods and Goddesses to witness, that I will, according to my power and judgment, make good this oath and covenant that I sign. I will use all ways of medical treatment that shall be for the advantage of the sufferers, according to my power and judgment, and will protect them from injury and injustice. Nor will I give to any man, though I be asked to give it, any deadly drug, nor will I consent that it should be given. But purely and holily I will keep guard over my life and my art.

“And into whatever houses I enter, I will enter into them for the benefit of the sufferers, departing from all wilful injustice and destructiveness, and all lustful works, on bodies, male and female, free and slaves. And whatever in practice I see or hear, or even outside practice, which it is not right should be told abroad, I will be silent, counting as unsaid what was said.

“Therefore to me, accomplishing this oath and not confounding it, may there be enjoyment of life and art, being in good repute among all men for ever and ever: but to me, transgressing and perjured, the contrary.”

Fine reading, Edwin thought. . . . The only deity of whom he was not quite certain was Panacea. Obviously the classical representative of Mother Siegel. It seemed to him a pity that the modern student was not bound by the formulæ of the Physician of Cos.

His three months in the casualty department passed away quickly, and in the spring of the year he found himself attached as dresser to that startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the experience was rather alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his genial vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to destroy the pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his experience in the casualty department. Lloyd Moore, to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his wit was ruthless and occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know; his language, particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and foul, even in the presence of women.

On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates would have regarded as undignified and improper. Sometimes in the out-patient department Edwin would blush for his chief’s violence and cruelty, but, in the end, all these things were forgotten in the realisation that the little man was a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the gods. Nor were his virtues merely professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was a man of the people, one who had fought his way inch by inch into the honourable position that he held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of the hospital absorbed him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in the district knew that he could count on the very best of the great man’s skill for a nominal fee in any case of emergency. Far more than any consultant in the Midlands, he was regarded as the general practitioner’s friend, and, as a result of this confidence, all the most interesting surgical material of the district found its way into his clinic.

In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of this amazing personality, until it seemed strange to him that he could ever have doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. He wondered more and more at the man’s titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale that he always looked as if he were fainting with exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was told in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was the very image of Jesus Christ.

In the days of the casualty department Edwin’s main concern had been with the alleviation of immediate pain. The problem of the wards was graver, being no less than the balance of life and death. In the achievements of L.M.’s scalpel, he saw the highest attainment of which surgery was capable. In a hundred cases offhand he could say to himself that but for Lloyd Moore’s skill the patient would have died, and when he saw the fragile figure of the surgeon with his pale face and burning eyes enter the theatre, Edwin would think of him as a man worn thin by wrestling with death . . . death in its most cruel and invincible moods.

But in the theatre, at the time of one of L.M.’s emergency operations, there was no time for dreaming or for romantic speculation. An atmosphere of materialism, of pure, sublimated action, filled the room as surely as the sweet fumes of chloroform and ether. Everything about the place was clean and bright and hard, from the frosted-glass of the roof and the porcelain walls to the shining instruments that lay newly sterilised in trays on the glass-topped tables. Even the theatre sister in her white overall gave an impression of clean, bright hardness. Indeed, in this white temple of sterility, everything was clean except those parts of the patient’s body that the nurses in the wards had not scrubbed with nail-brushes and shaved and painted with iodine, and the language of L.M., whose physical lustrations had no effect whatever on his vocabulary.

Even L.M.’s language was at times a relief, for it seemed to be the only human thing that ever gained admission to the theatre, and the sister was so inhuman as never to take the least notice of it. Not a smile, nor even the least compression of the lips marked her appreciation or disapproval of the surgeon’s sallies. Physically she was an extremely attractive woman, with very beautiful eyes that were not without their effect upon Edwin; but the influence of the place robbed her of any sexual attributes; so that she became no more than a monosyllabic automaton, intent, devoted, faultlessly prepared for any of the desperate emergencies of surgery. From the first Edwin had noticed that the more embarrassing physical details of the patients had no disturbing effect upon her modesty. He soon saw that if she had permitted herself for one moment to be a woman she could not have remained the wholly admirable theatre-sister that she was. “But I can’t imagine,” he thought, “how any man could marry a nurse—”