Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Story 15 - The Surgeon Talks

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:00)

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Thank you. Round the Red Lamp by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Section 18 The Surgeon Talks.

Men die of the diseases which they have studied most. Remark the surgeon, snipping off the end of a cigar, with all his professional neatness and finish.

It's as if the morbid condition was an evil creature, which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer.

If you worry the microbes too much, they may worry you.

I have seen cases of it, and not necessarily in mycropic diseases either.

There was, of course, the well-known instance of Liston's and the aneurysm, and a dozen others that I could mention. You couldn't have a clearer case than that of poor old Walker of St. Christopher's.

Not heard of it? Well, of course, it was a little before your time. But I wonder that it should have been forgotten.

You youngsters are so busy in keeping up to the day that you lose a good deal that is interesting of yesterday.

Walker was one of the best men in Europe on nervous disease. You must have read his little book on sclerosis of the posterior columns. It's as interesting as in novel and epoch-making in its way. He worked like a horse, dear Walker. Huge consulting practice, hours a day in the clinical wards, constant original investigations. And then he enjoyed himself also. Des mortuisses, of course, but still it's an open secret among all who knew him. If he died at 45, he cramped 80 years into it. The marvel was that he could have held on so long at the pace at which he was going, but he took it beautifully when it came. I was his clinical assistant at the time. Walker was lecturing on locomotor ataxia to a ward full of youngsters. He was explaining that one of the early signs of the complaint was that the patient could not put his heels together with his eyes shut without staggering. As he spoke, he suited the action to the word. I don't suppose the boys noticed anything. I did, and so did he, though he finished his lecture without a sign. When it was over, he came into my room and lit a cigarette. Just run over my reflexes, Smith, said he. There was hardly a trace of them left. I tapped away at his knee tendon, and might as well have tried to get a jerk out of that sofa cushion. He stood with his eyes shut again, and he swayed like a bush in the wind. So, said he, it was not intercostal neuralgia after all.

Then I knew that he had had the lightning pains, and that the case was complete. There was nothing to say, so I sat looking at him while he puffed and puffed at his cigarette. Here he was, a man in the prime of life, one of the handsomest men in London, with money, fame, social success, everything at his feet, and now, without a moment's warning, he was told that inevitable death lay before him, a death accompanied by more refined and lingering torches than if he were bound upon a Red Indian stake. He sat in the middle of the blue cigarette cloud, with his eyes cast down, and the slightest little tightening of his lips. Then he rose, with the motion of his arms, as one who throws off old thoughts and enters upon a new course. Better put this thing straight at once, said he. I must make some fresh arrangements. May I use your paper and envelopes?

He settled himself at my desk, and he wrote half a dozen letters. It is not a breach of confidence to say that they were not addressed to his professional brothers. Walker was a single man, which means that he was not restricted to a single woman. When he had finished, he walked out of that little room of mine, leaving every hope and ambition of his life behind him.

And he might have had another year of ignorance and peace if it had not been for the chance illustration in his lecture.

It took five years to kill him, and he stood it well. If he had ever been a little irregular, he atoned for it in that long martyrdom. He kept an admirable record of his own symptoms and worked out the eye changes more fully than has ever been done.

When the ptosis got very bad, he would hold his eyelid up with one hand while he wrote. Then when he could not co-ordinate his muscles to right, he dictated to his nurse. So he died in the odour of science, James Walker, AET 45