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

Elsworth explained that had he attempted to experiment with the cholera patients, if he had been so inclined, he would have fared no better than the native doctors, who were suspected of propagating the disease for the Government, who wished to deplete the population.

“Yes,” said Aunt Janet, “can we wonder at the poor Neapolitans and Spaniards, in the late cholera epidemics, attacking the doctors with sticks and stones, declaring they were spreading the disease – as, in fact, they were – by these abominable vaccinations?”

“I hear that Pasteur’s hydrophobia cure is entirely discredited by the French experts,” said Mildred.

“It is,” replied Elsworth; “and anybody who believed that God, and not the devil, governs the world, might have predicted its failure from the infernal nature of the process for keeping up the supply of the vaccine. Just fancy, keeping in cages, a lot of dogs inoculated with the virus, to inoculate again a lot of rabbits, ready for use for any patient who might want the treatment!”

“Do you know, Mr. Elsworth,” said Mildred, “I am almost afraid to venture the opinion, yet it is a growing one with me, that what is called scientific medicine is a contradiction in terms. The human stomach is not a test-tube, and till we leave off treating it as a dyer treats his vats, we can’t expect to make any progress. So many things go to make up therapeutic treatment. How often have I heard my father say that he never could do any good unless the patient had full faith in him!”

“I fear you do not estimate very highly either the education you got at St. Bernard’s, or the benefits such institutions confer on the people,” said Mr. Crowe, in a rather sneering tone, when Elsworth had assented to Mildred’s remarks.

Dr. Graves maintained that the hospital education given at St. Bernard’s was second to none in Europe, and doubted if it were possible to improve on its methods, as far as they went. “What do you say, Mr. Elsworth?” he asked.

“I hold,” said Elsworth, “that all hospitals are only necessary evils in an imperfect state of society.”

“I have long held that opinion, too,” replied Mildred; “it seems to me that our poor people are far too ready to get rid of their sick and troublesome relatives.”

“Yes, nursing is rapidly becoming a lost art amongst the working people,” remarked Aunt Janet. “The instant their children, husbands, or wives get sick, they are packed off to one or other of the charities which compete for their favours and they are troubled with them no more till they are cured.”

“You mean till they recover?” said Mildred, with an arch look.

“Oh, we really do make some cures, though our Spanish friends are cruel enough to say, ‘El medico lleva la plata pero Dios es que sana!’ (the doctor takes the fee, but God works the cure.”)

“I fear our noble art is not more highly esteemed here than in England,” said Dr. Graves.

“England is the very Paradise of doctors; though the art of medicine, so far from making progress even there, bids fair to be destroyed by a noisy and arrogant school,” said Elsworth emphatically.

“You mean the ultra-physiological party which goes in for these hideous inoculations?” asked Mildred.

“I do,” he replied. “While I was a student at the hospital, I often remarked the contempt with which many of the physicians spoke of drugs and of the people who believed in them; and found it difficult to reconcile all they said with their practice amongst their private patients who went to their consulting rooms and always returned armed with prescriptions which they were instructed should be dispensed only at the most eminent pharmacies. At the hospital, peppermint water was the great remedy for every complaint, except where some new thing was in hand which wanted testing; but when the guinea-paying public were to be dealt with, they received the most formidable prescriptions, resulting ultimately in rows of medicine bottles.”

Mr. Crowe looked very cross at this, and would have replied with bitterness had it not been for the ladies. To make matters worse, Aunt Janet capped it.

“Yes, I remember Dr. Lee declaring at a meeting of medical men that drugs were a delusion and a sham; and that nothing but nature and a good nurse were wanted to cure any complaint amenable to treatment.”

“What did the others say?” asked Elsworth.

“Oh, they objected that it was all very well for a Royal Physician, who had reached the top of the ladder to talk like that, but that it would not work well for those who were still climbing.”

Wishing to divert the conversation into another channel, Mildred asked Elsworth if he did not think with her that the great cause of sickness amongst the poor was due to drink – in England, at all events.

He agreed that it was so, but attributed the craze for alcohol partly to the climate, and partly to the gradual degradation of the social conditions of life amongst the poor. The separation between the masses and the classes was more pronounced, he thought, in England than in any other country of which he knew anything.

“I don’t wonder at the poor creatures drinking,” said he; “it is the only way they have of satisfying the natural aspiration of mankind for the ideal!”

“You mean, we are all more or less poets, and alcohol develops the latent genius within us?” said Mildred.

“I do, and I can never tolerate the argument that a man who drinks makes a beast of himself, because the beast can have no desire to minister to a sense which he does not possess.”

“Then you would say, that the universal desire for some sort of intoxication is a proof of the higher and immortal nature of man,” said Mr. Crowe.

“In a certain degree, yes; because all error is a perversion of some truth. A booze of bad beer and a glass of gin do for the lower man what Shakespeare and Keats, Bacon and Macaulay do for the cultured man – lift him for a while from his sordid surroundings, and raise him to a Monte Cristo palace of beautiful imagery. Mind, this is all the more sinful, all the more degrading at last, because it is buying of the devil at the price of your soul what God would have given you in another and a better way, if you had asked Him.”

“Very pretty,” said Crowe, “but I don’t believe it a bit!”

Dr. Graves said he thought that the theory was as clever, yet as improbable, as that of an American friend of his, who held that all children told lies, because by nature their dramatic faculties were in advance of their moral principles. Fibbing children were on this theory all premature poets.

And so the symposium ended, and the little party broke up.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

MILDRED FINDS HER WORK

“This is not our work,” you say, “this is the work of men.” Be it so if you like. Let them be the hands to do it: but who, if not women, are to be the hearts of the redemption of the poor from social wrong?

    – Stopford Brooke.

Live greatly; so shalt thou acquire
Unknown capacities of joy.

    – Coventry Patmore.

When the ladies reached their own room that night, Mildred began at once with something which was, evidently, uppermost in her mind.

“Aunt Janet, do you believe in special providences?”

“Do I not, dear! you know my life has been full of them.”

“Well, auntie, it seems absurd that every action of our lives should be interesting to Heaven, but I think I was sent to Granada as the great turning-point in my life.”

“Nothing very wonderful in that, if you believe that the hairs of our heads are all numbered, and that a sparrow does not fall to the ground without our Father’s knowledge. But what do you mean? Have you met your fate in the hero of Granada?”

“No, no! Nothing in the least romantic, but I have decided on my mission in life; you know I have been a long time on the look-out for it.”

“I always thought your mission, dear, was to make everyone the happier for having come in contact with you.”

“Ah, but you are an infatuated auntie, you know, and have always spoiled me, as papa did; but aren’t you anxious to know what I am going to be?”

“Something quixotic, Millie, to suit our surroundings. It is the couleur locale which has dazzled you; the romance of the Alhambra is too much for you. Is it a novelist or a poet? Don’t dear; the market is overstocked. Now, domestic service offers a grand field.”

“But I don’t feel it to be my vocation. I shall set to work to revolutionise the system of our great hospitals. I have seen enough to-day to convince me that, as at present constituted, they do as much harm as good.”

“Revolutionise the hospitals! Isn’t that rather ‘a large order?’”

“Weaker women than I have done greater things than this; and then remember, auntie dear, the lines —

‘And none are strong but who confess
With happy skill that they are weak.’