“Arteries always are in the wrong place,”
said Newson. “The normal’s the one
thing you practically never get. That’s
why it’s called the normal.”
“Don’t say things like that,” said
Philip, “or I shall cut myself.”
“If you cut yourself,” answered Newson,
full of information, “wash it at once with antiseptic.
It’s the one thing you’ve got to be careful
about. There was a chap here last year who gave
himself only a prick, and he didn’t bother about
it, and he got septicaemia.”
“Did he get all right?”
“Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and
had a look at him in the P. M. room.”
Philip’s back ached by the time it was proper
to have tea, and his luncheon had been so light that
he was quite ready for it. His hands smelt of
that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that
morning in the corridor. He thought his muffin
tasted of it too.
“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” said
Newson. “When you don’t have the good
old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely.”
“I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite,”
said Philip, as he followed up the muffin with a piece
of cake.
Philip’s ideas of the life of medical students,
like those of the public at large, were founded on
the pictures which Charles Dickens drew in the middle
of the nineteenth century. He soon discovered
that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer
at all like the medical student of the present.
It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession,
and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless.
They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple
of years; and then, because their funds come to an
end or because angry parents refuse any longer to
support them, drift away from the hospital. Others
find the examinations too hard for them; one failure
after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken,
they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding
buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which
before they had so pat. They remain year after
year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men:
some of them crawl through the examination of the
Apothecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants,
a precarious position in which they are at the mercy
of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness,
and Heaven only knows their end. But for the
most part medical students are industrious young men
of the middle-class with a sufficient allowance to
live in the respectable fashion they have been used
to; many are the sons of doctors who have already
something of the professional manner; their career
is mapped out: as soon as they are qualified they
propose to apply for a hospital appointment, after
holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far East
as a ship’s doctor), they will join their father
and spend the rest of their days in a country practice.
One or two are marked out as exceptionally brilliant:
they will take the various prizes and scholarships
which are open each year to the deserving, get one
appointment after another at the hospital, go on the
staff, take a consulting-room in Harley Street, and,
specialising in one subject or another, become prosperous,
eminent, and titled.
