It was not quite my first surgical experiment, for I had bound up cut fingers before then, and once roughly tended to the broken arm of a school-fellow, who had fallen in climbing a tree, though my attention merely consisted in laying the arm straight and bandaging it with a woollen comforter, while the doctor was fetched; but all the same I felt very hot, nervous, and uncomfortable, as, in following out Mr Frewen’s instructions, I cut away the hair, bathed the place, and told him exactly what I saw, horrible as it was.
“Pooh!” he said, with a little laugh. “A mere scratch. Why, if it were a patient I was attending—you, for instance—I should say you were making a miserable fuss about nothing.”
“But it is very bad, sir,” I said. “Why, you were quite insensible.”
“Yes, Dale, that was the contusion. One of the chests must have been driven against my head like a square shot. Well, there’s one comfort, the skull isn’t cracked. Now cut some strips of that plaister, and place them across and across.”
I followed out his instructions, and ended by laying some lint over the wound and securing all with a neatly sewn on bandage.
He turned very pale twice over as I was busy, and, in obedience to a whisper, I took down a bottle and measured out some of its contents, afterwards administering the dose in water.
“Not pleasant stuff, Dale,” he said, smiling feebly, “and it’s rather hard lines, as you lads would call it, for a doctor to have to take his own stuff; but you see I have a nasty crack, and if I had not been a particularly thick-headed sort of fellow, I’m afraid I should not have wanted another.”
“What is that you have taken?” I asked. “Only ammonia—sal volatile—a capital stimulus when faintness comes on. There, I’m better now, and I dare say I shall do. I can examine you now. Ribs broken, eh?”
“I thought so, sir.”
“And I’m sure you are wrong, my lad. If your ribs, or even one rib, had been fractured, you could not have gone on working for me like that. You would have been in agony.”