THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE LONDON MEDICAL STUDENT.
6.—OF THE GRINDER AND HIS CLASS.
One fine morning, in the October of the third winter session, the student is suddenly struck by the recollection that at the end of the course the time will arrive for him to be thinking about undergoing the ordeals of the Hall and College. Making up his mind, therefore, to begin studying in earnest, he becomes a pro tempore member of a temperance society, pledging himself to abstain from immoderate beer for six months: he also purchases a coffee-pot, a reading-candlestick, and Steggall’s Manual; and then, contriving to accumulate five guineas to pay a “grinder,” he routs out his old note-books from the bottom of his box, and commences to “read for the Hall.”
Aspirants to honours in law, physic, or divinity, each know the value of private cramming—a process by which their brains are fattened, by abstinence from liquids and an increase of dry food (some of it very dry), like the livers of Strasbourg geese. There are grinders in each of these three professional classes; but the medical teacher is the man of the most varied and eccentric knowledge. Not only is he intimately acquainted with the different branches required to be studied, but he is also master of all their minutiæ. In accordance with the taste of the examiners, he learns and imparts to his class at what degree of heat water boils in a balloon—how the article of commerce, Prussian blue, is more easily and correctly defined as the Ferrosesquicyanuret of the cyanide of potassium—why the nitrous oxyde, or laughing gas, induces people to make such asses of themselves; and, especially, all sorts of individual inquiries, which, if continued at the present rate, will range from “Who discovered the use of the spleen?” to “Who killed cock robin?” for aught we know. They ask questions at the Hall quite as vague as these.
It is twelve o’clock at noon. In a large room, ornamented by shelves of bottles and preparations, with varnished prints of medical plants and cases of articulated bones and ligaments, a number of young men are seated round a long table covered with baize, in the centre of whom an intellectual-looking man, whose well-developed forehead shows the amount of knowledge it can contain, is interrogating by turns each of the students, and endeavouring to impress the points in question on their memories by various diverting associations. Each of his pupils, as he passes his examination, furnishes him with a copy of the subjects touched upon; and by studying these minutely, the private teacher forms a pretty correct idea of the general run of the “Hall questions.”
“Now, Mr. Muff,” says the gentleman to one of his class, handing him a bottle of something which appears like specimens of a chestnut colt’s coat after he had been clipped; “what’s that, sir?”
“That’s cow-itch, sir,” replies Mr. Muff.