Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Story 11 - A Medical Document

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

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Round the Red Lamp by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Section 12 A Medical Document Medical men are, as a class, very much too busy to take stock of singular situations or dramatic events. Thus, it happens that the ablest chronicler of their experiences in our literature was a lawyer. A life spent in watching over deathbeds or over birthbeds which are infinitely more trying takes something from a man's sense of proportion, as constant strong waters might corrupt his palate. The overstimulated nerve ceases to respond. Ask the surgeon for his best experiences, and he may reply that he has seen little that is remarkable, or break away into the technical. But catch him some night when the fire has purred up and his pipe is reeking with a few of his brother practitioners for company, and an artful question or allusion to set him going. Then you will get some raw green facts new plucked from the tree of life. It is after one of the quarterly dinners of the Midland branch of the British Medical Association. Twenty coffee cups, a dozen liquor glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which swirls slowly along the high gilded ceiling gives a hint of a successful gathering.

But the members have shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy, bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing top hats has gone from the hotel corridor. Round the fire, in the sitting room, three medicos are still lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits back at the table.

On the cover of an open journal, he is writing furiously with a stylographic pen, asking a question in an innocent voice from time to time, and so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a tendency to wane. The three men are all of that staid middle-age which begins early and lasts late in the profession. They are none of them famous, yet each is of good repute, and a fair type of his particular branch. The portly man with the authoritative manner, and the white vitriol splash upon his cheek is Charlie Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum and author of the brilliant monograph, Obscure Nervous Lesions in the Unmarried.

He always wears his collar high like that, since the half successful attempt of a student of revelations took out his throat with a splinter of glass.

The second, with the ruddy face and the merry brown eyes is the general practitioner, a man of vast experience who, with his three assistants and his five horses, takes twenty-five hundred a year in half-ground visits and chilling consultations out of the poorest quarter of a great city.

That cheery face of Theodore Foster is seen at the side of a hundred sickbeds a day, and if he has one-third more names on his visiting list than in his cash book, he always promises himself that he will get level someday when a millionaire with a chronic complaint, the ideal combination, shall seek his services.

The third, sitting on the right with his dress shoes, shining on top of the fender, is Hargrave, the rising surgeon. His face has none of the broad humanity of Theodore Foster's. The eyes stern and critical, the mouth straight and severe, but there is strength and decision in every line of it. And it is nerve rather than sympathy, which the patient demands when he is bad enough to come to Hargrave's door. He calls himself a jawman, a mere jawman, as he modestly puts it. But in point of fact, he is too young and too poor to confine himself to a speciality, and there is nothing surgical which Hargrave has not the skill and audacity to do. Before, after, and during, murmurs the general practitioner in answer to some interpolation of the outsiders. I assure you, Manson, one sees all sorts of evanescent forms of madness.

Ah, pure pearl, throws in the other, knocking the curved gray ash from a cigar. But you had some case in your mind, Foster.

Well, there was only one last week which was new to me. I had been engaged by some people of the name of Silko. When the trouble came round, I went myself, for they would not hear of an assistant. The husband, who was a policeman, was sitting at the head of the bed on the further side. This won't do, said I. Oh, yes, doctor, it must do, said she. It's quite irregular and he must go, said I. It's that or nothing, said she. I won't open my mouth or stir a finger the whole night, said he.