St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student. Edward Berdoe

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СКАЧАТЬ Bradlaugh and Besantism was vulgar and slightly fusty; but he must denounce priestcraft and other worldism, as became all true followers of medicine, and emancipated souls baptized into the spirit of the age.

      Elsworth took lodgings in Lindsay Street, just opposite Mrs. Harper’s house. He soon became attached to little Murphy for his genial disposition and cheerful heart, and it was not long before he found some attraction in the lively company surrounding him. His own landlady was serious and prim, and rigorously excluded the fast set of men at the hospital. “What suited Mrs. Harper wouldn’t suit her,” she used to say; “and if medical students couldn’t behave themselves like other folk, she wouldn’t have anything to do with ’em.” So it was only quiet men who went to live at Mrs. White’s – men who kept good hours, and didn’t kick up rows in their rooms; “she wouldn’t have it at no price.” She went to the little Baptist chapel in Bethesda Court, hard by, and was a good, worthy woman, who made all about her the better for the faith she professed; and though her grammar was defective, and her notions crude, her religion made, as Rowland Hill remarked, “even her cat the better for it,” for her feline companion never drank her lodgers’ brandy, nor smoked their cigars, “nor took aught that wasn’t his’n.” She kept her rooms, as became a good Baptist, beautifully clean; and a man who wanted to read hard, and be quiet at his work, found it a privilege to be cared for by Mrs. White. Here, when not at the schools, Elsworth was almost always to be found; and human bones were scattered grimly about the room. A valuable microscope, with a large cabinet of preparations and sections, and a well-stocked bookcase of works of anatomy and physiology, gave the sitting-room a learned aspect, which of itself seemed to repress the rising desire of any young visitor to invite the occupant to “a shindy.”

      CHAPTER V.

      THE BEADLE AND THE THEATRE

      ’Tis part of my proud fate

      To lecture to as many thick-skulled youths

      As please, each day, to throng the theatre.

– Browning (“Paracelsus”).

      O Youth and Joy, your airy tread

      Too lightly springs by Sorrow’s bed;

      Your keen eye-glances are too bright,

      Too restless for a sick man’s sight.

– Keble.

      Old Jeremiah Horne was the beadle of the medical school at St. Bernard’s. He had held the post now for nearly thirty years, and his father held it before him. He and his family lived on the premises, and the post was generally understood to be a lucrative one. His motto was, “Nothing for nothing, and very little for a halfpenny.” He was a portly man, very dignified in his manner towards the younger students, who were kept at arm’s-length by him for purposes they well understood. He was not hard on them for their mischief, their breach of rules, their neglect of work, or any of their shortcomings, only they had to understand, if they wanted his aid, they must tip him well and tip him often. And this they did, and so Jerry Horne “waxed fat and kicked;” and even the professors themselves somehow came to recognise that the beadle was a not less important factor in the school than one of themselves. He could restore order when they individually or collectively repeatedly failed. A word from him would reduce the most refractory to his senses, when the threats and the preaching of the teachers fell on deaf ears. His business was to see that the theatres and class-rooms were duly arranged for lectures. He had to provide a proper supply of subjects for dissection, to prepare them and allot them in due order. But his most important duty, and the one which gave him the whip hand over all the men, was to register their attendance at lectures, and so make or mar their prospects of being duly “signed up” at the end of the session. By the rules of the examining bodies at “the Hall” or the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, a student must attend a certain proportion of all the lectures delivered in his school before his papers can be received and himself duly entered as a candidate for the necessary legal examinations which he must pass before he can get his diploma or certificate to practice. Mr. Horne’s conscience was elastic; and if a sufficient number of half-crowns and shillings were flying about, he could always see and register the presence of a man in the theatre at lecture who was probably at home in bed half a mile away. As everybody voted lectures a great bore, especially those which began at 8 or 9 o’clock on a winter’s morning, this was a great convenience. The lecturers poured forth their wisdom to a scant attendance at such times, and Mr. Horne’s half-crowns grew and multiplied.

      At all the lectures it was the duty of the beadle and his assistant to occupy a convenient post, in view of the whole auditory, so that he could mark the individual attendance and detect those engaged in larking during the progress of the lecture. Under such circumstances it was a task to the ingenuity of the boys to let off crackers without detection, or shy potatoes and cabbages at the botany lecturer for purposes of classification. The pundits themselves usually took the interruptions in a good-humoured way, doubtless reflecting that medical science has, from immemorial time, been imparted – in the British Isles, at least – under similar difficult conditions; so these being recognised as conditions, they had to yield to the inevitable with the best grace they might. But as they looked to the beadle to keep order by means they knew him to possess, it was incumbent on Mr. Horne, now and then, to “espy” somebody, usually one out of favour with him temporarily, either from being deep in his debt or from having wounded his dignity. When a scape-goat or two had been thus caught, they had to pass an unpleasant quarter of an hour in the private room of the warden, and give assurances of better behaviour under threats of expulsion or suspension of schedules. The patience of the lecturers was admirable; they bore most interruptions with exemplary meekness, but they always resented pea-shooting as disturbing to the exact thinking and speaking necessary in treating scientific subjects. The botany lecturer, indeed, was a pattern of amiability. Not even a potato plump against his snowy shirt front, or a cabbage flop on his manuscript, disturbed him much or drove him into strong language. “Ah, thanks! yes, my young friend, that tuber is the Solanum tuberosum; it is a good specimen, but a little out of order. We have not yet reached the Solanaceæ. Will the young gentleman who has thus rather roughly drawn my attention to his specimen kindly tell me the characteristics of that order, and name the principal medicinal plants belonging to it? You, sir, I think it was, who forwarded me the example; Mr. – , Mr. – , your name escapes me for the moment. I mean the gentleman with an ecchymosis under his left eye.” The gentleman with the ecchymosis knew as much about the order in question as his bull terrier knew of astronomy; and amid the uproarious laughter of his class-mates, ever ready for a diversion of interest, on being pressed by the lecturer to exhibit his knowledge of the potato tribe, was fain to confess that he knew little more about the species than he saw of them on the dinner-table. He began to wish he had not thrown that tuber, and the laugh was well turned against him as the lecturer scored several neat points in dealing with him. This was one of the recognised and old-established methods of defence adopted by the persecuted teachers, and a good example of the survival of the fittest theory. The chair could really only be held by development of such defence, and the ingenuity of the students in organizing new systems of attack had to be met by improvement in their repulse. It was armour-plating versus guns, and the armour-plating generally saved the ship. Professor Letts would have been a lost man one morning at the chemistry lecture had he not caught the man who threw the lighted squib on the lecture table, where it fizzed and bobbed amongst his neatly fixed-up apparatus for an hour with the gases. “You, sir!” he cried, in his determined, assertive manner that always commanded and secured respect; “you, sir, you squib-thrower, come forward to the black-board! You are going up for your preliminary science; give me the chemical formula for that explosive. We are considering nitrogen this morning; you shall give the audience the benefit of your, doubtless, complete knowledge of your favourite gas. Nitrogen is your favourite gas, is it not, Mr. Albery?” Now poor Albery had to maintain a reputation for chemistry on a very slender basis, and withal was a nervous man; and being all the while unmercifully twitted by Mr. Letts, his symbols got mixed, and he returned to his seat feeling that the squib itself was not more completely “bust up” than he. One of the СКАЧАТЬ