Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon

Fenn George Manville

Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon

Chapter One.

My Patients

I have had patients enough in a busy life as a working surgeon, you may be sure, but of all that I have had, young or old, give me your genuine, simple-hearted working man; for whether he be down with an ordinary sickness or an extraordinary accident, he is always the same – enduring, forbearing, hopeful, and with that thorough faith in his medical man that does so much towards helping on a cure.

Wealthy patients as a rule do not possess that faith in their doctor. They always seem to expect that a disease which has been coming on, perhaps, for months, can be cured right off in a few hours by a touch of the doctor’s hand. If this result does not follow, and I may tell you at once it never does – unless it be in a case of toothache, and a tooth is drawn – the patient is peevish and fretful, the doctor is looked upon as unskilful, and, money being no object, the chances are that before the doctor or surgeon has had a chance, another practitioner is called in.

On the other hand, a quiet stalwart working man comes to you with a childlike faith and simplicity; he is at one with you; and he helps his cure by his simple profound belief in your skill.

A great deal of working-class doctoring and surgery has fallen to my lot, for fate threw me into a mixed practice. Sooner than wait at home idle for patients who might never come, I have made a point of taking any man’s practice pro tem, while the owner was ill, or away upon a holiday, and so improved my own knowledge better than I should have done by reading ever so hard. The consequence is that I have been a good deal about the country, and amongst a great variety of people, and the result of my experience is that your genuine working man, if he has been unspoiled by publicans, and those sinners, the demagogues, who are always putting false notions into his head, is a thoroughly sterling individual. That is the rule. I need not quote the exceptions, for there are black sheep enough among them, even as there are among other classes. Take him all in all, the British workman is a being of whom we may well be proud, and the better he is treated the brighter the colours in which he will come out.

Of course he has his weak points; we all have them, and very unpleasant creatures we should be without. A man all strong points is the kind of being to avoid. Have nothing to do with him. Depend upon it the finest – the most human of God’s creatures, are those who have their share of imperfections mingled with the good that is in every one more or less.

They are men, these workers, who need the surgeon more than ordinary people, for too often their lives are the lives of soldiers fighting in the battle of life; and many are the wounded and slain.

I used at one time – from no love of the morbid, please bear in mind, but from genuine desire to study my profession – to think that I should like to go out as an army surgeon, and be with a regiment through some terrible war. For it seemed to me that nothing could do more towards making a professional man prompt and full of resources than being called upon to help his suffering fellow-creatures – shot down, cut down, trampled beneath horses’ feet, blown up, bayoneted, hurt in one of the thousand ways incidental to warfare, besides suffering from the many diseases that follow in an army’s train. But I very soon learned that there was no need for any such adventure, for I could find ample demands on such poor skill as I possessed by devoting myself to the great army of toilers fighting in our midst. Talk of demands upon a man’s energy and skill; calls upon his nerve; needs for promptness and presence of mind! There are plenty such in our every-day life; for, shocking as it may sound, the tale of killed and wounded every week in busy England is terribly heavy. Go to some manufacturing town where steam hisses and pants, and there is the throb and whirr of machinery from morn till night – yes, and onward still from night to morn – where the furnaces are never allowed to slacken – go there and visit the infirmary, and you will find plenty of wounded in the course of the year. You have the same result, too, in the agricultural districts, where, peaceful as is the labourer’s pursuit, he cannot avoid mishaps with horses, waggons, threshing-machines, even with his simple working tools. In busy London itself the immense variety of calls upon the surgeon’s skill leaves him little to desire in the way of experience.

Many years of sheer toil have caused a kind of friendship to grow up between me and the working man. In fact I consider myself a working man, and a hard-worker. I have told you how I like him for a patient, but I have not told you of the many good qualities that I have found, too often lying latent in his breast. Those I will touch upon incidentally in the course of these pages, for years ago the fancy came upon me to make a kind of note-book of particular cases, principally for my own amusement. Not a surgical or medical note-book, but a few short jottings of the peculiarities of the cases, and these short jottings grew into long ones, so that now I present them to the reader as so many sketches of working men – adventures, that is to say, met with in their particular avocations.

Sometimes I have been called in to attend the workman for the special case of which his little narrative treats, for I have thought it better for the most part to let him tell his story in his own words; and now I come to look through my collection – the gatherings of many years – I find that I have a strange variety of incident, some of which in their peril and danger will show those who have never given a thought to such a subject, how many are the risks to which the busy ants of our great hill are exposed, and how often they go about their daily tasks with their lives in their hands.

Chapter Two.

My Patient the Stoker

I would not wish for a better specimen of faith and confidence than was shown by one of my patients, Edward Brown, a stoker, with whose little narrative I will commence my sketches.

“Ah! doctor,” he said one day, “I wish you had had to do with me when I came back from the East.”

“Why?” I said, and went on dressing a very serious injury he had received to one hand, caused by his crushing it between a large piece of coal and the edge of the furnace door.

“Because I should have got better much quicker if I had known you.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, “your own medical man may have done his best.”

“Perhaps he did,” was the reply. “But, lor! hard down I was just then. It brings it all up again – those words.”

“What words?” I said. “There, don’t let that bandage be touched by anyone.”

“‘In the midst of life we are in death.’”

“Why, Brown!” I exclaimed.

“Yes sir, those were the words – ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ And they sounded so quiet and solemn, that Mary and I stopped short close to the old-fashioned gate at the little churchyard; and then, as if we moved and thought together, we went in softly to the funeral, and stood at a little distance, me with my hat off and Mary with her head bent down, till the service was over.

“There it all is again as I’m telling it to you, come back as fresh and clear as if I was looking at it now: a nice little old-fashioned church, with a stone wall round the yard, where the graves lay pretty thick and close, but all looking green and flowery and old, a great clump of the biggest and oldest yew-trees I ever saw, and a tall thick hedge separating the churchyard from the clergyman’s house. The sun was shining brightly, turning the moss-covered roofs of the church and vicarage into gold; from the trees close by came the faint twittering of birds, and away past the village houses bathed in the bright afternoon sunshine there were the fields of crimson clover, and the banks full of golden broom and gorse. Over all was a sense of such peace and silence that it seemed as if there was nothing terrible, only a quiet sadness in the funeral, with its few mourners round the open grave, and the grey-haired clergyman standing by; and last of all, when Mary and I went up and looked into the grave, and read on the coffin-plate, ‘Aged 77.’ one couldn’t help feeling that the poor soul had only gone to sleep tired with a long life.

“It was my fancy perhaps, but as we strolled round that churchyard, and read a tombstone here and a board there, it seemed as if no sooner had the parson gone in to take off his surplice, and the mourners left the churchyard, than the whole place woke up again into busy life. A chaffinch came and jerked out its bit of a song in one of the yews, the Guinea-fowls in a farm close by set up their loud crying, the geese shrieked on the green, and creaking, and rattling and bumping, there came along a high-filled waggon of the sweetest hay that ever was caught in loose handfuls by the boughs of the trees, and then fell softly back into the road.

“We were very quiet, Mary and I, as we strolled out of the churchyard, down one of the lanes; and then crossing a stile, we went through a couple of fields, and sat down on another stile, with the high hedge on one side of us and the meadow, that they were beginning to mow at the other end, one glorious bed of flowers and soft feathery grass.

“‘Polly,’ I says at last, breaking the silence, ‘ain’t this heavenly?’

“‘And you feel better?’ she says, laying her hand on mine.

“‘Better!’ I says, taking a long draught of the soft sweet-scented air, and filling my chest – ‘better, old girl! I feel as if I was growing backwards into a boy.’

“‘And you fifty last week!’ she says.

“‘Yes,’ I says, smiling, ‘and you forty-seven next week.’ And then we sat thinking for a bit.

“‘Polly,’ I says at last, as I sat there drinking in that soft breeze, and feeling it give me strength, ‘it’s worth being ill only to feel as I do now.’

“For you see I’d been very bad, else I dare say I’m not the man to go hanging about churchyards and watching funerals: I’m a stoker, and my work lies in steamers trading to the East. I’d come home from my last voyage bad with fever, caught out in one of those nasty hot bad-smelling ports – been carried home to die, as my mates thought; and it was being like this, and getting better, that had set me thinking so seriously, and made me so quiet; not that I was ever a noisy sort of man, as any one who knows me will say. And now, after getting better, the doctor had said I must go into the country to get strength; so as there was no more voyaging till I was strong, there was nothing for it but to leave the youngsters under the care of the eldest girl and a neighbour, and come and take lodgings out in this quiet Surrey village.

“Polly never thought I should get better, and one time no more did I; for about a month before this time, as I lay hollow-eyed and yellow on the bed, knowing, too, how bad I looked – for I used to make young Dick bring me the looking-glass every morning – the doctor came as usual, and like a blunt Englishman I put it to him flat.

“‘Doctor,’ I says, ‘you don’t think I shall get better?’ and I looked him straight in the face.

“‘Oh, come, come, my man!’ he says, smiling, ‘we never look at the black side like that.’

“‘None of that, doctor,’ I says; ‘out with it like a man. I can stand it: I’ve been expecting to be drowned or blown up half my life, so I shan’t be scared at what you say.’

“‘Well, my man,’ he says, ‘your symptoms are of a very grave nature. You see the fever had undermined you before you came home, and unless – ’

“‘All right, doctor,’ I says; ‘I understand: you mean that unless you can get a new plate in the boiler, she won’t stand another voyage.’

“‘Oh, come! we won’t look upon it as a hopeless case,’ he says; ‘there’s always hope;’ and after a little more talk, he shook hands and went away.

“Next day, when he came, I had been thinking it all over, and was ready for him. I don’t believe I was a bit better; in fact, I know I was drifting fast, and I saw it in his eyes as well.

“I waited till he had asked me his different questions, and then just as he was getting up to go, I asked him to sit down again.

“‘Polly, my dear,’ I says, ‘I just want a few words with the doctor;’ and she put her apron up to her eyes and went out, closing the door after her very softly, while the doctor looked at me curious-like, and waited for me to speak.

“‘Doctor,’ I says, ‘you’ve about given me up. There, don’t shake your head, for I know. Now don’t you think I’m afraid to die, for I don’t believe I am; but look here: there’s seven children downstairs, and if I leave my wife a widow with the few pounds I’ve been able to save, what’s to become of them? Can’t you pull me through?’

“‘My dear fellow,’ he says, ‘honestly I’ve done everything I can for your case.’

“‘That’s what you think, doctor,’ I says, ‘but look here: I’ve been at sea thirty years, and in seven wrecks. It’s been like dodging death with me a score of times. Why, I pulled my wife there regularly out of the hands of death, and I’m not going to give up now. I’ve been – ’

“‘Stop, stop,’ he says gently. ‘You’re exciting yourself.’

“‘Not a bit,’ I says, though my voice was quite a whisper. ‘I’ve had this over all night, and I’ve come to think I must be up and doing my duty.’

“‘But, my good man – ’ he began.

“‘Listen to me, doctor,’ I says. ‘A score of times I might have given up and been drowned, but I made a fight for it and was saved. Now I mean to make a fight for it here, for the sake of the wife and bairns. I don’t mean to die, doctor, without a struggle. I believe this here, that life’s given to us all as a treasure to keep; we might throw it away by our own folly at any time, but there’s hundreds of times when we may preserve it, and we never know whether we can save it till we try. Give me a drink of that water.’

“He held the glass to my lips, and I took a big draught and went on, he seeming all the time to be stopping to humour me in my madness.

“‘That’s better, doctor,’ I says. ‘Now look here, sir, speaking as one who has sailed the seas, it’s a terrible stormy time with me; there’s a lee shore close at hand, the fires are drowned out, and unless we can get up a bit of sail, there’s no chance for me. Now then, doctor, can you get up a bit of sail?’

“‘I’ll go and send you something that will quiet you,’ he said, rising.

“‘Thank ye, doctor,’ I says, smiling to myself. ‘And now look here,’ I says, ‘I’m not going to give up till the last; and when that last comes, and the ship’s going down, why, I shall have a try if I can’t swim to safety. If that fails, and I can really feel that it is to be, why, I hope I shall go down into the great deep calmly, like a hopeful man, praying that Somebody above will forgive me all I’ve done amiss, and stretch out His fatherly hand to my little ones at home.’

“He went away, and I dropped asleep, worn out with my exertion.

“When I woke, Polly was standing by the bedside watching me, with a bottle and glass on the little table.

“As soon as she saw my eyes open, she shook up the stuff, and poured it into a wine-glass.

“‘Is that what the doctor sent?’ I says.

“‘Yes, dear; you were to take it directly.’

“‘Then I shan’t take it,’ I says. ‘He’s given me up, and that stuff’s only to keep me quiet. Polly, you go and make me some beef-tea, and make it strong.’

“She looked horrified, poor old girl, and was going to beg me to take hold of the rotten life-belt he’d sent me, when I held out my shaking hand for it, took the glass, and let it tilt over – there was only about a couple of teaspoonfuls in it – and the stuff fell on the carpet.

“I saw the tears come in her eyes, but she said nothing – only put down the glass, and ran out to make the beef-tea.

“The doctor didn’t come till late next day, and I was lying very still and drowsy, half asleep like, but I was awake enough to hear him whisper to Polly, ‘Sinking fast;’ and I heard her give such a heart-broken sob, that as the next great wave came on the sea where I was floating, I struck out with all my might, rose over it, and floated gently down the other side.

“For the next four days – putting it as a drowning man striving for his life like a true-hearted fellow – it was like great foaming waves coming to wash over me, but the shore still in sight, and me trying hard to reach it.

“And it was a grim, hard fight: a dozen times I could have given up, folded my arms, and said goodbye to the dear old watching face safe on shore; but a look at that always cheered me, and I fought on again and again, till at last the sea seemed to go down, and, in utter weariness, I turned on my back to float restfully with the tide bearing me shorewards, till I touched the sands, crept up them, and fell down worn out, to sleep in the warm sun – safe!

“That’s a curious way of putting it, you may say, but it seems natural to me to mix it up with the things of seagoing life, and the manner in which I’ve seen so many fight hard for their lives. It was just like striving in the midst of a storm to me, and when at last I did fall into a deep sleep, I felt surprised – like to find myself lying in my own bed, with Polly watching by me; and when I stretched out my hand, and took hers, she let loose what she had kept hidden from me before, and, falling on her knees by my bedside, she sobbed for very joy.

“‘As much beef-tea and brandy as you can get him to take,’ the doctor says, that afternoon; and it wasn’t long before I got from slops to solids, and then was sent, as I told you, into the country to get strong, while the doctor got no end of praise for the cure he had made.

“I never said a word though, even to Polly, for he did his best; but I don’t think any medicine would have cured me then.

“I was saying a little while back that I pulled my wife regularly out of the hands of death, and of course that was when we were both quite young; though, for the matter of that, I don’t feel much different, and can’t well see the change. That was in one of the Cape steamers, when I first took to stoking. They were little ramshackle sort of boats in those days, and how it was more weren’t lost puzzles me. It was more due to the weather than the make or finding of the ships, I can tell you, that they used to steer their way safe to port; and yet the passengers, poor things, knowing no better, used to take passage, ay, and make a voyage too, from which they never got back.

“Well, I was working on board a steamer as they used to call the Equator, heavy laden and with about twenty passengers on board. We started down Channel and away with all well, till we got right down off the west coast of Africa, when there came one of the heaviest storms I was ever in. Even for a well-found steamer, such as they can build to-day, it would have been a hard fight; but with our poor shaky wooden tub, it was a hopeless case from the first.

“Our skipper made a brave fight of it, though, and tried hard to make for one of the ports; but, bless you! what can a man do when, after ten days’ knocking about, the coals run out, and the fires, that have been kept going with wood and oil, and everything that can be thrust into the furnaces, are drowned; when the paddle-wheels are only in the way, every bit of sail set is blown clean out of the bolt-ropes, and at last the ship begins to drift fast for a lee shore?

“That was our case, and every hour the sea seemed to get higher, and the wind more fierce, while I heard from more than one man how fast the water was gaining below.

“My mate and I didn’t want any telling, though. We’d been driven up out of the stoke-hole like a pair of drowned rats, and came on deck to find the bulwarks ripped away, and the sea every now and then leaping aboard, and washing the lumber about in all directions.

“The skipper was behaving very well, and he kept us all at the pumps, turn and turn in spells, but we might as well have tried to pump the sea dry; and when, with the water gaining fast, we told him what we thought, he owned as it was no use, and we gave up.

“We’d all been at it, crew and passengers, about forty of us altogether, including the women – five of them they were, and they were all on deck, lashed in a sheltered place, close to the poop. Very pitiful it was to see them fighting hard at first and clinging to the side, but only to grow weaker, half-drowned as they were; and I saw two sink down at last and hang drooping-like from their lashings, dead, for not a soul could do them a turn.

“I was holding on by the shrouds when the mate got to the skipper’s side, and I saw in his blank white face what he was telling him. Of course we couldn’t hear his words in such a storm, but we didn’t want to, for we knew well enough he was saying —

“‘She’s sinking!’

“Next moment there was a rush made for the boats, and two of the passengers cut loose a couple of the women; place was made for them before the first boat was too full, and she was lowered down, cast off, and a big wave carried her clear of the steamer. I saw her for a moment on the top of the ridge, and then she plunged down the other side out of our sight – and that of everybody else; for how long she lived, who can say? She was never picked up or heard of again.

“Giving a bit of a cheer, our chaps turned to the next, and were getting in when there came a wave like a mountain, ripped her from the davits, and when I shook the water from my eyes, there she was hanging by one end, stove in, and the men who had tried to launch her gone – skipper and mate as well.

“There were only seven of us now, and I could see besides the three women lashed to the side, and only one of them was alive; and for a bit no one moved, everybody being stunned-like with horror; but there came a lull, and feeling that the steamer was sinking under our feet, I shouted out to the boys to come on, and we ran to the last boat, climbed in, and were casting off, when I happened to catch sight of the women lashed under the bulwarks there.

“‘Hold hard!’ I roars, for I saw one of them wave her hand.

“‘Come on, you fool,’ shouts my mate, ‘she’s going down!’

“I pray I may never be put to it again like that, with all a man’s selfish desire for life fighting against him. For a moment I shut my eyes, and they began to lower; but I was obliged to open them again, and as I did so, I saw a wild scared face, with long wet hair clinging round it, and a pair of little white hands were stretched out to me as if for help.

“‘Hold hard!’ I shouts.

“‘No, no,’ roared out two or three, ‘there isn’t a moment;’ and as the boat was being lowered from the davits, I made a jump, caught the bulwarks with my hands, and climbed back on board, just as the boat kissed the water, was unhooked, and floated away.

“Then as I crept, hand-over-hand, to the girl’s side, whipped out my knife, and was cutting her loose, while her weak arms clung to me, I felt a horrible feeling of despair come over me, for the boat was leaving us; and I knew what a coward I was at heart, as I had to fight with myself so as not to leave the girl to her fate, and leap overboard to swim for my life. I got the better of it, though – went down on my knees, so as not to see the boat, and got the poor trembling, clinging creature loose.

“‘Now, my lass,’ I says, ‘quick’ – and I raised her up – ‘hold on by the side while I make fast a rope round you.’

“And then I stood up to hail the boat – the boat as warn’t there, for in those brief moments she must have capsized, and we were alone on the sinking steamer, which now lay in the trough of the sea.

“As soon as I got over the horror of the feeling, a sort of stony despair came over me; but when I saw that little pale appealing face at my side, looking to me for help, that brought the manhood back, and in saying encouraging things to her, I did myself good.

“My first idea was to make something that would float us, but I gave that up directly, for I could feel that I was helpless; and getting the poor girl more into shelter, I took a bit of tobacco in a sort of stolid way, and sat down with a cork life-buoy over my arm, one which I had cut loose from where it had hung forgotten behind the wheel.

“But I never used it, for the storm went down fast, and the steamer floated still, waterlogged, for three days, when we were picked up by a passing vessel, half-starved, but hoping. And during that time my companion had told me that she was the attendant of one of the lady passengers on board; and at last, when we parted at the Cape, she kissed my hand, and called me her hero, who had saved her life – poor grimey me, you know!