The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

But our closest friends can come so close to us and no closer; they surround us but none of them enters us. Nature forbids that any but our own feet should cross the bridge spanning the distance between other people and the fortress of the individual. Across that bridge we can take with us no companions except those that keep silent amid its silences; that can speak to us but that cannot see us: those great voices without eyes; those great listeners without ears; great counsellors without criticism; great hands that guide and refuse to smite; great judges that embody law and refuse to sit in judgment on us—Books.

Some of the doctor's books held for him life's indispensable laughter; and no one of us ever tells all the things in this world that we laugh at. Some held for him life's tears; and no one of us ever tells the things that secretly start our own. Some held neither laughter nor tears but what is above both—life's calm; and what one of us but at times feels the need to ascend to some inner mountain-top of our own spirits—far above the whole darkened or radiant cloud-rack of emotion—and look futureward into the promised peace, the end of our wandering. Joys—sorrows—and calm: these three for him, too.

Such books stayed with the doctor year after year. He could wake in the night and find them through the darkness; in the darkness they knew how to find him. They were not part of his medical library, of course, which was another matter. But they filled three sides of a large low revolving bookcase in the middle of the room beside his easy chair and his lamp and table.

The fourth side of his bookcase held the books that came and went as a stream, entering and passing on: he drank from them as they flowed by. Always they were books of fiction or biography which held in solution the truth of the human matter about some life that had fought or was fighting its path through to victory. Always he would have books of victory. By preference it must be a story real or imagined of some boy, youth, young man, middle-aged man, who was in the struggle for existence and who was on the side of survival. He kept in mind the words of a great Frenchman that the way to make an impression upon the world is to plough through humanity like a cannon-ball or to creep through it like a pestilence. But he knew that in this world there are very few human cannonballs, though of such pestilence there is always more than enough. Rather every common man's life, and every uncommon man's life, is a drawn sword that has to cut its way through all other drawn swords. Here were the books which disclosed the mettle of a character: the last magnificent refusal to be ruined by evil which is the very breath of a man and the slow measure of the world's advance. So that, while much is always failing in everybody, all is never failing. Out of the blackest abyss there arises in the wounded and prostrate some white peak of unmelting innocence—at the base of which Life's battle rages.

Many a time long after midnight he would read to a finish some such triumphant story; and with a murmur of "Well done!" he would close the book, turn out his lamp, and go to sleep in his chair with his clothes on—with that scene of victory emptying its echoes into his ear and his dreams.

Here, then, was some discrete knowledge of the doctor as a doctor and as a man. But there was one thing in his library that blended these two separate aspects, showing how the man felt as a physician and how the physician felt as a man. This was a series of pictures running around the walls and connecting great epochs in the progress of Medicine.

He had a liking, as the world has, for some brief series of climaxes that will depict a subject at a glance. Very memorable to him was Shakespeare's Seven Ages—because they were seven and were thus easily grasped by poetry and reason. But he knew that Shakespeare might as truly have substituted another seven—with as good poetry and reason; or he might have made the ages fourteen or forty-nine or forty-nine hundred; for actually the ages of a man's life are infinite; but being reduced to seven, we all recognize them.

And memorable to him likewise had been Hogarth's Progress of the Rake with its few pictures; and his Progress of the Harlot with its few; and his Progress of Marriage à la Mode with its few; and the Progress of Cruelty with its fewest of all—only four, but more than enough! And yet the stages in the progress of the rake and of the harlot and of marriage à la mode and of cruelty are infinite; and at no single stage in the progress of any one of them could you actually find either Rake or Harlot or Infidelity or Cruelty. Being portrayed as few, the world understands and finds its own account in them.

So around the walls of his library there hung a series of pictures showing the progress of Medicine across the ages.

The first picture represented a scene in the life of primitive man, during the period when he had long enough been man to form into hostile tribes, but not long enough to have advanced far from the boundaries of the brute. It is a battle picture: the battle is over: the survivors are gone: the dead and wounded lie about. Medicine as a human science has not yet been born; surgery has not yet separated itself from the movements of instinct. Yet there was activity among the wounded. In some of the warriors you saw such attempts in the care of their wounds as one may witness to-day in wounded birds and animals—if one is fortunate enough to be so placed as to be able to watch: there were the instinctive devices to cleanse, to protect, to alleviate: those low beginnings of the great science which you may observe to-day in your dog when he has come home after a fight with lacerated ears and slashed thighs—when he crawls under the porch to the darkest corner to keep away other dogs and light and flies; whose sole instrument of cleansing is his tongue and whose only bathing fluid is saliva. On that battle-field you saw such beginnings of surgery as to-day is practised by a bird treating its broken wing or broken leg. Thus the wounded warriors concerned themselves with their hurts—all mother-naked. Along one edge of the battle-field was a stream of running water; some had started to draw themselves toward this and had died on the way. One was stretched full alongside—a young chief of magnificent proportions and a face of higher intelligence. And out of that intelligence, as a marvellous advance in the development of man, you saw one action: he was dipping up water in the palm of his hand and pouring it upon his wound. At some moment in the history of the race there must somewhere have been that first movement of the developing animal to substitute water for saliva. That great historic moment was depicted there. It was still the Azoic Age of Medicine.