The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

Near by hung a second picture. Ages have passed, no one knows how many. The brute has become Prometheus; he has learned the use of fire; and he has learned the most heroic application of flame—to touch it to himself where he is in greatest agony: that is, he has learned to cauterize his wounds. More than fire can he now handle; he has learned to bring together fat and flame; and he has discovered how from flame to produce oil; and he has learned to pour boiling oil into the holes in his body made by the implements of war. It is the long Ages of Medicine for the cautery and burning oil.

A third picture hung next. More ages have passed, no one knows how many; and the scene is another battle-field far down toward modern times. It is France; it is the second half of the sixteenth century; it is warfare in Piedmont. Troops are sweeping up the hill, and in the background is a walled city with turrets and towers; and in the foreground wounded soldiers are arriving or are lying about on the ground. There is a rude mass of masonry used as an operating-table; and on the operating-table is a soldier, one of whose legs has just been amputated above the knee; an attendant holds the saw with which the leg has just been sawed off, and the stump of it has dropped below. Beside the wounded man stand two figures: one the figure of the past; and the other a figure of the future—a poor barber's apprentice, father of modern surgery, named to be massacred on St. Bartholomew's eve, but spared because none but a despised Huguenot could be found in all France skilful enough to safeguard the royal orthodox blood. There beside the soldier they stand, these two, and in them ages meet; for the figure of the past holds in his hand one of the cauteries that are kept redhot in a brazier near his feet; and the other holds in his a new thing in the world—a simple ligature. A great scene, a great epoch: the beginning of new surgery when the flowing of blood from amputations of the great arteries could be stopped by a mere bandage: that man—Ambroise Paré!

More centuries have passed—we know exactly how many now from year to year. It is the nineteenth, and it is the New World; the next picture on the library wall portrayed a scene on the Western frontier of a new civilization. It is the backwoods of Kentucky, it is a pioneer settlement of three or four hundred souls, nearly a thousand miles from any hospital or dissecting-room. In the front door of his rude pioneer house stands a Kentucky country doctor, Ephraim MacDowell. His patient is before him, a woman on horseback in a side-saddle. She has just arrived, having ridden some seventy miles through the wilderness. He is assisting her to alight; and he is soon to perform, without consultation, without precedent in the ages of surgery (but not without a prayer for himself and her), by strength of his own will and nerve and by the light of the solitary candle of his own genius, an operation which made Kentucky the mother of ovarian surgery for all coming time, a new epoch of life and mercy: he going his own way to immortality as Shakespeare went his, as the greatest always go theirs—by a new path untrumpeted and alone.

Another picture represented a scene in Boston in 1846, less than half a century later; for the lonely mountain peaks of progress stretching across the ages are beginning to crowd each other now; they are beginning to run together into a range of continuous discovery. That picture also shows an operating-room; and there stood the American Morton, making for the world the first merciful use of anæsthetics: with which the silence of painlessness fell upon humanity's old outcry of torture under treatment.

There the doctor's pictures ended. In our own time he might have added one more for the epoch of the Roentgen Ray and another for the Finsen Light; and another for transfusion of blood; and still others crowning other mountain-tops in the new Surgery and new Medicine.

Thus he had before his eyes in his library some few Ages of his Science—as it went forward and slipped back and missed the road and forgot the road, yet somehow steadily advanced across the centuries like an erring unconquerable man across his years. Not progressing however as a man grows, from infancy to decrepitude; but moving from its old age toward its youth, always toward its youth, as Swedenborg's Angels fly forever toward their Spring. It ran around his walls like a great roadway, connecting the last discoveries of his Science with the surgery of the wolf who gnaws off his imprisoned leg and with the medicine of the sick dog that eats grass.

He called it his World's Path of Lessening Pain.

It was the last refuge and solace of his often tired and often wounded mind. Even after friends were gone at night and the poker chips were stacked or the whist counters folded; after the sideboard had been visited and temperately forsaken; after the abiding books had done for him what they could; in the still house far into the night, he would sometimes lie back in his chair and survey those battle-pictures of a science on which he was spending his loyalty and his strength.

Once, in younger days, outside the Eternal City, he had gone to study those fragments of the Old Roman Aqueduct that to-day are slowly crumbling on the Campagna; and standing alone before it he had in imagination searched for the figure of some young workman who had helped to mould those brick or to finish those columns: the figure of some obscure vanished peasant. So the great wall of his science, being built onward across the centuries into the future, would be revisited by men of the future in places where it stood in ruins. He would be as one whose life with its mistakes was yet linked to indestructible good. He would vanish from beside the wall himself, but his work upon it would have helped to uphold humanity. And many a night he went asleep in his chair, committing himself to his Science, as the forgotten Roman laborer of old may have fallen asleep under his own arch.

But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature measures all things on the scale of the sublime—sometimes as your eye is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that hut a single human being; and the thought may come to you that there, in the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps.