The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

His speciality was disease affecting the heart or lungs, and though his wards at the infirmary were open to all sorts of general medical cases, these two types of tragedy came most frequently under his care and Edwin’s observation. Sir Arthur exacted from his clerks the preparation of accurate and voluminous notes on all his cases, and Edwin spent many hours in the wards extracting from his patients the details of family and medical history and moulding them into a balanced and intelligible report. The emotions that the study of the tubercle bacillus had aroused in him in the laboratory were reinforced a hundred times in the wards devoted to phthisical patients, too far advanced in dissolution for sanatorium treatment, that were his chief’s especial care.

They were most of them creatures of intelligence and sensitiveness above the average of the hospital patient; their eyes shone between their long lashes with a light that may have been taken for that of inspiration in those of dead poets; even in the later stages of the disease, when their strength would hardly allow them to drag up their emaciated limbs in their beds, and their bodies were wrung nightly with devastating sweats or attacks of hæmorrhage that left them transparent and exhausted—even then they were so ready to be cheerful and to let their imagination blossom in vain hope, that Edwin found them the most pitiful of all his patients. The spes phthisica seemed to him the most pathetic as well as the most merciful of illusions.

In this ward he became acquainted with one patient in particular, a boy, the son of labouring parents whom heredity and circumstance alike had marked down from the day of his birth to be a victim of the disease. His mother and two sisters had died of it, and all his short life had been spent in a labourer’s cottage made deadly by the family’s infection, at the sunless bottom of a wet Welsh valley.

As a child he had been too delicate to enjoy the fresh air that he would have breathed on the way to the village school. He had lived, as far as Edwin could make out, in the single room in which his mother had lain dying, and had learned to read and write at her side. Then she had died; and as soon as he was old enough he had been sent out to work on the farm where his father was employed, an occupation that might well have saved him if the work and the exposure had not been too severe, or if he had not returned at night to the infected hovel. As it was, in the rainy autumn weather of the hills, he had caught a chill and sickened with pleurisy, and thus the inevitable had happened.

He was only fifteen. Education had never come his way, and he had never read any books but the Confessions of Maria Monk and the family Bible; but whenever Edwin came to go over his chest and make the necessary report of progress—fallacious word—upon his case sheets, he noticed that the boy would hide a sheet of paper on which he had been writing. His confidence was easily won, and without the least shame he showed Edwin what he had been doing. He had spent his time in writing verses composed, for the most part, in the jingling measures of Moody and Sankey’s hymns. They were sprinkled with strange dialect words that filled them with splashes of sombre colour; most of them were frankly ungrammatical; but there were things in some of them that seemed to Edwin to bear the same relation to poetry as the mountain tricklings of that far hill country bore to the full stream of Severn. Their banalities, faintly imitated from the banalities of the hymn book, were occasionally relieved by phrases of pure beauty that caught the breath with surprise.

“Why do you do this?” Edwin asked, and when he had recovered from the shyness and diffidence into which the question had cast him, the boy told him that he wrote his verses because he couldn’t help it, because the words became an obsession to him and would not let him sleep until they were written down. The thin flame of creative aspiration showed itself in other ways, in the patient’s vivid delight in colours and sounds, and in the strange pictures, having no relation to nature, that he drew with coloured chalks.

It seemed to Edwin that in this case the exhaustion of chronic disease had revealed the existence, as it sometimes will, of a faint fire of natural genius. “There, but for the spite of heaven,” he thought, “goes John Keats,” and, with the feelings of an experimenter in explosives who mixes strange reagents, he lent his patient a copy of the poet’s works.

The boy fell on them eagerly. He confessed that he did not understand them; but he would read them all day, mispronouncing the words as the classical student perhaps mispronounces those of the Greek poets, but extracting from their sonorous beauty a curious and vivid sensual satisfaction. A single line would sometimes throw him into a kind of trance, and he would lean back in his bed with the book open on his chest and his slender clubbed fingers clasped above it, repeating to himself his own version of the words without any conception of their real meaning. Sometimes a line would fill him with memories:—

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery moon, and eve’s one star . . .”

“That is like our home,” he would say.