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

Besides, don’t you think the public is almost ready for a revolution on this question?”

“You know, Mildred, my opinion; but I never could see my way clear to any interference with hospitals. It is a terrible responsibility, don’t you think?”

“Poor papa has often declared to me that the public would one day wake up to the fact that the hospital was one of the great shams of the time.”

“I know, dear. But St. Bernard’s having made your papa’s fame and fortune, isn’t it rather a shame to upset the concern?”

“I have no desire to upset anything. Don’t you remember how we rebuilt our parish church at Welby, without stopping the services for a single day? That is what I want to do in this case.”

“I don’t quite follow you, dear.”

“Well, of course I haven’t formed any complete scheme yet; but I have often thought that what we want in London, for instance, is a sort of Hospital University, with a great number of affiliated colleges of healing. Not a great unwieldy Cathedral of Surgery as they call it, here and there, but a ‘Chapel of Ease’ at every sufferer’s door. Fifty beds should be the limit, I think.”

“Not enough. Don’t you know the examining bodies do not recognise as a teaching hospital one with less than two hundred beds?”

“But I am concerned with healing the sick, not with teaching students.”

“Just so; but where are your future doctors to come from if you cut off their only way of learning their business?”

“Do you really believe the present system is the only way of training medical men and medical women, for I recognise the right and advantage of women students?”

“Your papa has often told me that a doctor can only be liberally educated by being enabled to draw his conclusions from a great number of facts; and, as each case has some peculiar feature, the more cases he sees, even of the same disease, the more the intelligent pupil will learn.”

“I see the force of that,” replied Mildred, “but I think my scheme would meet it. I would make use of the great pauper infirmaries, at present entirely wasted, as schools of medicine.”

“I fear they would prove very imperfect substitutes for the great hospitals. I am told, and I can readily understand it to be the fact, that the cases which gravitate to the parish infirmary are usually chronic diseases, old-standing bronchitic, asthmatic, and rheumatic troubles, with bed cases innumerable; and all of little or no use to the student.”

“But wait, aunt; you have only heard of one side of my plan; it provides for a vast and efficient system of out-door treatment. I strongly object to rushing every troublesome phase of disease away from home, and placing it in a great hospital. My indoor scheme would only embrace such cases as could not wisely be treated in the family. What at present do you take to be the chief passport to a bed in a general hospital?”

“The malady which has the greatest interest for the doctor who has power to admit it.”

“Precisely. But, as it is not the doctors who support the hospitals, don’t you think the intentions of the subscribers are often defeated by this system? Is it not, in fact, getting money under false pretences to ask for funds to help sick folk, and then apply them to even so good a purpose as medical education?”

“I think you put it too strongly, Mildred. The public does understand that in supporting the hospital, they are training their doctors.”

“Then,” said Mildred, “the fraud is on the patients. Lady Ponsonby de Tompkyns gives a big cheque to the hospitals, that she may have confidence that no new remedies may first be used upon her. Like the lady of the Fly papers, who

‘Wouldn’t try ’em on her cat,
If she could try ’em on another.’

You see, the public is in this dilemma – either they are deceived as to the way patients are treated, or if not then the poor sufferers are misled to their grievous hurt.”

“I know of terrible things which Sister Agnes has told me,” said Aunt Janet; “and I am afraid more goes on than even she knows. Your father told me of a case of puerperal fever which was clearly one of licensed murder. He protested, but in vain. A poor woman recently confined was suffering from hyperpyrexia, which no drugs would abate. The physician in charge had become enamoured of the iced-water-bath treatment, and the wretched woman was the first victim at St. Bernard’s to the new fad. She was kept for four hours a day in the cold water at her bedside. When she died, her relatives all protested she was murdered.”

“That must have discredited the treatment rather.”

“Not at all; they persevered in ‘giving the thing a fair trial.’ The Germans invented it, and said it was very effectual in bringing down high temperatures. At St. Bernard’s, it brought the patients down, and the doctors could not bring them up again: and, as all the cases died, the authorities stopped the experiments; but some of the physicians declare to this day, I believe, that ‘there was something in it, after all.’ Mr. Crowe was very strongly in favour of it; he said it was physiologically right, and therefore must be so medically.”

“But perhaps the patients would all have died, any way,” said Mildred.

“Very likely; but what cruel torture in your last moments to be served like that!”

“Yes, that is the horrible part of the business. At an hospital, you cannot even die in peace; you are in danger of being the subject of some ghastly medical freak while there is a gasp left in you.”

“Yet, as the doctor must necessarily be an autocrat in his treatment, I don’t see how you can interfere with him,” mused Aunt Janet.

“Oh, can’t you! Do you think they would dare do such things in a parish infirmary? What a pretty storm there would be if our Mr. Hilbourne, for instance, heard of such things at St. Mark’s Workhouse! Don’t you think the doctors content themselves with using the best of their already acquired knowledge there?” asked Mildred.

“Yet, the poor think much more highly of hospital than of infirmary treatment.”

“Naturally. It is drummed into them a hundred times a day by everybody in the place, that everything is being done for their benefit. Papa told me of ‘a very pretty knee case’ which had been fourteen months in the wards, merely because it was an object of surgical interest, and was the subject of a monograph.”

“Your scheme, I fear, would not provide for monographs!”

“I fear you think I am very quixotic, aunt.”

“No, dear; you are not tilting at windmills, but at real dragons, which I am afraid are much too strong for you! But we must think it over. Dr. Graves is a good, sensible man, and though of course wrapped up in the conventionalism of his class is still open to reason. You will want more armour, and a sharper sword than Isabella’s for this fight, I am thinking.”

“Yet, I can see,” said the girl, “in my prophetic vision, our Boabdil giving me the key of the fortress, if we go to work properly. Meanwhile, let us build our Santa Fe.”

“Castles in Spain! dear – just the place for them. I can see ghosts of giant physiologists and vampire surgeons guarding the treasures of their vermilion towers, and warning you off their premises.”

“I don’t fear them, aunt. I shall visit Isabella’s tomb again for courage, though.”

“I think we had better sleep over this. Buenas noches, señorita.”

“Con dios.”

When the time came to leave Granada, Aunt Janet noticed that her niece was in rather low spirits. She guessed the cause, for it was manifest she was more than interested in the young doctor; and though it was difficult to say whether her interest was more in his work than in himself, or the contrary, she was glad that something had arisen to rouse the girl from the grief which had weighed upon her since her father’s death. That was the charm of Aunt Janet – she always accepted accomplished facts with equanimity, and perhaps was rather a fatalist. If Mildred was really in love, so much the better – she thought it would replace the lost light which had gone out of her life; and if, still better, she had really found a great philanthropic object in life, why the meeting with young Elsworth was the best thing that could have happened.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them how we will.”

Would it not be strange if it should turn out that Elsworth’s exile to Granada, and their visit, should be the centre round which the lives of two noble souls should revolve?

CHAPTER XL.

“SHOD WITH WOOL!”

There is no strange handwriting on the wall,
Thro’ all the midnight hum no threatening call,
Nor on the marble floor the stealthy fall
Of fatal footsteps. All is safe. Thou fool,
The avenging deities are shod with wool!

    – W. Allen Butler.

But the sinner who would fain
Cover murder’s crimson stain,