The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“This is a great blow to me,” said Mr. Ingleby solemnly, overwhelming Edwin with a picture of virtuous poverty staggering from a cowardly blow in the dark; and the obvious distrust with which his father regarded him made his position at home almost intolerable. It seemed to him that his father now looked upon all his pleasures with suspicion; and, as a natural result, he lived more than ever to himself, only returning to Halesby late at night or at times when he knew that his father would be busy in the shop. One circumstance came to bridge the gap between them, a course of pharmacology that Edwin took early in his fourth year. He was delighted to find a subject in which his father was more learned than himself, and spent a number of hours that were almost happy in the shop answering the questions that Mr. Ingleby put to him on pharmacopoeial doses and searching the little nests of drawers for rare drugs to identify in their raw state. But the pharmacology course was short, and the subject that was so important in his father’s life was small and unimportant in Edwin’s. In addition to which he could not help feeling a sort of ethical prejudice against the complacency with which his father discharged patent medicines that he knew to be worthless if not harmful.

Every circumstance tended to isolate him from the influences of Halesby. His sudden attempt to be friendly with Edward Willis had withered under the humiliating dénouement of his adventure with Dorothy Powys; the new fields of music that he explored with Matthew Boyce had made him discontented with Aunt Laura’s ballads; the general air of elegance and refinement with which he had become acquainted in one or two Alvaston houses to which the Boyces had introduced him, made everything in Halesby, even his own home, seem a little shabby and unsatisfactory. North Bromwich, and his work there, claimed him more and more.

II

Even when his first enthusiasms and the inspiring generalisations that arose from them were exhausted, he found that he could not escape from the fascination of the studies which he now pursued, for the most part, in the company of Matthew Boyce. His third year had not only introduced him to the romance of surgery and the human interests of hospital life. He had spent long hours in the pathological laboratory and had made acquaintance with bacteriology, a science that was still in its infancy.

In this work he had shared a desk with Boyce, to whom it was particularly attractive, and between them they had developed a bacteriological technique rather above the average, taking an imaginative delight in the isolation of the microscopic deadly forms of vegetable life that are responsible for nearly all the physical sufferings of mankind. When they looked together at the banded bacilli of tubercule, stained red with carbolfuchsin, they saw more than a specimen under a coverglass: they saw the chosen and bitter enemies of genius, the malignant, insensate spores of lowest life that had banished Keats to fade in Rome, Shelley to drown by Via Reggio, Stevenson to perish in Samoa: the blind instruments of destruction that were even then draining the last strength from the opium-sodden frame of the author of The Hound of Heaven. Here, in a single test-tube, they could see enclosed enough of the organisms of cholera to sweep all Asia with a wave of pestilence; here, stained with Indian ink, the dreamy trypanosome that had wrapped the swarming shores of the Nyanzas of dark Africa in the sleep of death.

Both of them were seized with a passionate fever for research, to rid humanity of this insidious and appalling blight. Now, more than ever, they felt the supreme responsibilities of their calling; and when, in their fourth year, they passed on to their work in the medical wards, as clerks to the senior physician at the Infirmary, and saw the effects of bacterial havoc on the bodies of men and women, their enthusiasm rose to a still higher pitch.

The canons of the new university decreed that students who had learnt their surgery at one hospital should study medicine at the other. It was something of a disappointment to Edwin to exchange the homely atmosphere of Prince’s, where everything was familiar, for the colder and more formal wards of the Infirmary. This hospital, which was nearly twice the size of the other, was situated in the lower and less healthy part of the city. At Prince’s there had been a way of escape westwards through the pleasant suburban greens of Alvaston to the country and the hills. The Infirmary, in its terra-cotta arrogance, had been set down in the heart of unreclaimed slums, in such a way that its very magnificence and efficiency were depressing by contrast. Edwin disliked the palatial splendour of its shining wards which, for all their roominess, were full of an air that suffocated; for the windows were never opened, and the atmosphere that the patients breathed had been sucked into the place by an immense system of forced ventilation, filtered until it seemed to have lost all its nature, heated, and then propelled through innumerable shafts into every corner of the building. In the basement of the hospital the machine that was responsible for this circulation of heated air made a melancholy groaning; and this sound made the whole structure seem more like an artificial assembly of matter than a real hospital with a personality and a soul.

It is possible that the teaching methods of the Infirmary were superior to those of Prince’s; and the supporters of the institution prided themselves on the fact that the nursing staff was drawn from a higher social stratum; but for a long time Edwin felt considerably less at home there than he had been at the older hospital. The ward work, however, was even more fascinating, for the reason, no doubt, that his wonder was now tempered with a higher degree of erudition.

He found his new chief an inspiring figure. In the first place, the fact that he was a gentleman and a man of culture made him an effective contrast to that dynamic but plebeian genius, L.M. He was a graduate of one of the older universities, and though this counted for little in the mind of Edwin, who now affected to despise the city of his broken dream, it did lend an air of distinction to Sir Arthur Weldon’s discourses. He had a quiet voice, an admirable manner with women patients or nurses, and beautiful hands, on one of which he wore a signet ring embellished with his crest and a motto which his presence merited: “In toto teres atque rotundus.” The rotundity, it may be added, was so mild as to do no more than accentuate the elegance of a gold and platinum watch-chain that he wore. He was a great stickler for the traditions and dignity of his profession, and no word that was not infallibly correct disturbed the urbanity of his slow and polished periods. For this reason his tutorials in the wards were models of academic dignity, and much frequented by students who knew that he was far too anxious for the form of his discourse to break its continuity by asking awkward questions. He treated his clerks, and indeed every member of his classes, as if they were gentlemen nurtured in the same fine atmosphere as himself. He inspired confidence, and demanded nothing in return but correctness of behaviour and speech.

All these things made it easy to work for him; and the fact that over and above these social qualities he was a particularly sound physician, with a reputation that was already more than provincial, made Edwin sensible of the privilege of acting as his clerk.