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

self-sacrifice are worth all the talents in the world.

– G. H. Lewes.

      The comfort or the misery of many families may probably hang upon the notions that each of you will carry from this place.

– Sir Thomas Watson.

      But Lindsay Street was not wholly inhabited by the idlers. There were many men who led solitary lives at their lodgings, and worked night and day at books or bed side. Some took portions of their subjects home to dissect, and the back gardens at their lodgings were often used as places of sepulture for brains, hands, or as Tom Hood sings, —

      “Those little feet that used to look so pretty.

      There’s one I know in Bunhill Row, the other’s in the City.”

      Maternity cases were attended by the junior students at the homes of the patients within a radius of two miles of the hospital. This served to bring them into direct contact with the poor, and familiarized them with scenes of the most horrible destitution in the filthiest and lowest slums of the metropolis. The young men were usually favourites with the people, who are always taken with the free and easy, the good-humoured and generous behaviour of medical students, anxious to improve their own knowledge of work which will be of the greatest importance to them in their future career, and glad to render their – sometimes very far from skilled – services to uncomplaining poverty, with a view to getting their papers signed for the colleges, which demand a definite amount of this work to be performed while in connection with their medical school. It was hourly enforced upon them that such was their only chance of the free and unrestricted use of human “material” for acquiring this sort of information. Their blunders, their negligences, would not count against them whilst in a state of pupilage. A great city, a poverty-stricken population, a benevolent public, and the custom of their profession, had placed at their disposal an immense amount of raw material, unbounded facilities for picking up knowledge, and the deft use of mysterious and complicated instruments. This skill, this dexterous use of the tools of their art, would shortly enable them to earn a handsome living. Let, then, every moment be devoted to obtaining that knowledge at the cost of ignorant and uncomplaining patients who would only see in their attentions the desire of a charitable young gentleman to help them, just as the visiting lady and the clergyman helped them efficiently. Let, then, every day and every case enable them to use more skilfully, under such clinical conditions, those tools the awkward use of which would inevitably be detected in the higher walks of their art to which they are progressing. Such is the admirable way in which the highest skill and wisdom of medicine is combined with the attempts of the novices to attain it in the practice of the hospitals, that the shortcomings and feeble efforts of the learners are glorified and ennobled by the brilliant successes of the teachers, till the mistakes are lost sight of in the dazzling triumphs of their achievements. It is like the Catholic doctrine of works of supererogation. St. Francis Xavier was so much better than he had any occasion to be, that he had a fund of merit at his disposal for helping the deficiencies of those who fell short in their good works.

      A great surgeon achieves a brilliant success in an operation which sends a man away from the wards to his own home restored in health and limbs to his family and his work. It is the hospital which gets the credit, and the credit is sufficient to atone for many of the maimings and other unfortunate terminations of a score of cases, which are looked upon as failures, not of much greater consequence than Beau Brummel’s cravats cast aside on his dressing-table. It will not do to be too hard on the failures. Even Professor Holloway did not publish them. The advertisements of quack and royal surgeon are alike in this respect at least, that they do not go into any such unnecessary details!

      But oh, the spoiled cravats! condemned to drag out a wretched existence because they had the misfortune to be not only ignorant, and poor, and powerless, but waste material used by St. Bernard’s in the attempt to make of any person able to pay its fees a competent healer of diseases. Not enough was it that they were born into a hard and cruel world, heavily handicapped by feeble frames and badly developed brains, without education or any of the means of lifting themselves from the slough of their environments, but it was also required of them by our advanced civilization that they should yield up their poor bodies, which were enough like better people’s frames for the purpose, to become “teaching stuff” for classes at a medical school.

      It was in Lindsay Street, and with Mrs. Jemima White, that Elsworth went to lodge. He had abundant strength of mind, and it was little to him that his fellow-boarders were a rather noisy set. He had full control of himself, and did not permit them to influence him unduly in the matter of sprees. He settled down steadily to his work, and did not find his friends interfere with him much when they saw his tastes were not quite their own; on the contrary, they rather respected him for his diligence, in which there was not the least element of the prig. As for his religion, – for Elsworth came to St. Bernard’s deeply imbued with the religious spirit, – they smiled at him when he talked of it, which was but seldom, as who should say, “Poor innocent! you will outgrow all that quickly here, and find faith and the scalpel, dogma and the microscope, go ill together!”

      Yet they knew very well that several of their best men were earnest, faithful Christian souls, who found high scholarship and the deepest devotion to their profession accord extremely well with the doctrines they professed. Still, the prevailing tone of the place, of students and of teachers alike, was not in accord with religious feeling. The school atmosphere was prejudicial to the cultivation of the Christian sentiment; and whatever godliness was taken in by the first-year’s man had usually left him long before he left St. Bernard’s; for there was a new goddess, whose culture was daily in the ascendant, and St. Bernard’s was one of her sacred places. Here she was wont to be honoured, and the supreme God in the newer worship was forgotten. Her glory so far outshone His that the men never named Him, except in their expletives, nor was He in any of their thoughts. It was not held so much an error to believe in the God of the Bible and the Creator and Sustainer of the world, as an amiable weakness, a mark of defective education, a lay feebleness of mind, excellent in subscribers to and governors of hospitals, good also for patients as helping to teach them submission, not bad at all for sisters and nurses for a similar reason; but for medical men, the true high priests of science, utterly inconsistent with their training and their mental attitude, which was the demand for – facts! ever facts! and still more facts! Christianity in a medical man meant an imperfect medical man; one who had been arrested in his development, – a sort of spina bifida case, or a microcephalic idiot; want of lime in the bones, defective iron and phosphorus; excellent condition for a subscriber, wofully defective in a user. For it was discovered that the completely developed, the men full of lime, iron, and phosphorus, the men of robust intellect and of the full standard, did not, as a rule, subscribe anything to anything, least of all to hospitals. Hospital contributors all went to church, and read their Bibles, and then wrote cheques Q.E.D.; whereas they, the persons for whose benefit chiefly all these cheques were signed, did neither, because they were above such weaknesses, as became Fellows of Royal Colleges and Bachelors of Science.

      It required, therefore, no small amount of courage for a St. Bernard’s man to profess Christianity there. He might don a philosophical religion of Humanity, profess an eclectic faith compounded of Buddhism and George Eliot, with a dash at Renan, because downright 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,