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

“Can’t I see you privately, doctor?”

“Why?”

“Well, sir, I do not like to undergo all this before these young gentlemen.”

“You are married, I believe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you any boys?”

“Two, doctor.”

“Would you like your eldest to be a great physician when he grows up?”

“Oh, yes, indeed I should, if he were clever enough!”

“I thought so. Now all these young gentlemen’s mammas have the same desire, and have sent them to me for that purpose. If you don’t help them, they can’t learn to be doctors. Now, nurse, assist this lady to undress.” And, without sparing the poor creature a pang of shame, he would submit her to a degrading ordeal, so that every one of his boys might have the chance of learning that for which, as he said, “they have paid large sums of money.”

To amuse them and impress them with the idea of his wit, he would, in the presence of patient and nurses, often tell shady stories as broad as they were long. Such droll scenes, such lively contests between one weak, suffering woman (for he would never permit a patient to bring mother or friend into his room), and this brilliant physician and his admiring, tittering pupils, made the gynæcological out-patients’ days the great fun of the place. “Beats Punch into fits!” said Murphy. “Never half as much spree at the play!” vowed Robins. But it was poor spree and very mitigated fun to the hundreds of afflicted creatures who sought this great doctor’s aid; for great he was and very skilful, and had saved many thousands of sufferers from pain and discomfort. He was a generous, patient, useful man, and in his private practice was everything that could be desired in a doctor; but he thought, and that thoroughly, that he was at St. Bernard’s first to interest and teach in the completest manner all the men who attended his classes. If in this doctor-factory any sick woman could avail herself of the by-product or waste for her cure or relief, she was heartily welcome. In any case, her attendance served his purpose very well indeed – unless she became troublesome, and refused to comply with some of his too outrageous demands, and then her letter would be taken from her, and marked by the doctor “Refuses treatment,” and she would be escorted out of the hospital by one of the nurses.

Sometimes “a very pretty case,” as they called good clinical subjects, would be taken into the wards, with the assurance that it could only be effectually treated there, but really that it might be daily examined and watched by the students, although it would have done as well or even better at home. Thus he used a bed – at say a cost of a pound a week for two months, – a bed which in another case, far worse but not so interesting, would have been much better engaged. Of course the pupils were not unmindful of all these efforts for their advancement when they got into practice; and as they were daily qualifying, Dr. Stanforth was daily making a number of valuable friends.

CHAPTER XXIX.

AN IDEAL PHYSICIAN

The Christ Himself had been no Lawgiver,Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.– Elizabeth B. Browning.

He hansels not his new experiments on the bodies of his patients, letting loose mad receipts into the sick man’s body, to try how well nature in him will fight against them, whilst himself stands by and sees the battle.

– Thomas Fuller.

Darwin spending whole nights watching pots of earth-worms, and studying minutely the habits of these creatures – Thoreau exiling himself from civilization that he might learn how to live cheerfully and healthily, in company with the animals of the forest, are examples of the true method of learning from Nature. There can be no real sympathy with those with whom we have to deal apart from an intense desire to know them intimately. Can we expect to reach the heart of Nature except by the royal road of love?

Elsworth learned this in his voluntary exile, – learned that he could interrogate Nature, get at her secrets and apply them to the healing of mankind, when he had reverently put off the shoes from his feet and entered her temple as a worshipper, rather than as the devastator placing the abomination of desolation in the holy place. The secret of Nature, as of the Lord, is with them that fear her.

To analyse a rose is a poor way of learning the sweetness of its perfume; to master the language of a country is of the first necessity to knowing anything about its people.

The Monte Sagrado is reached by a road made through the hill of the Albayzin, which overhangs it on one side. Everywhere we see masses of enormous Indian figs, or prickly pear, the fruit which for months together forms the chief diet of the gipsy population. They live in a quarter by themselves, outside the city, as did the Jews in their ghettos in Italy. In Granada they are more settled in their habits than in other places, with the exception of Seville. Their dwellings are caves dug out of the hill-side, and it is very curious to see the smoke from their fires issuing from holes in the ground amongst the Indian fig plants. Very dirty and smoky are these grottoes; the only daylight which can enter them comes through the doorway. As a rule, the furniture is of the most wretched description, though some of the burrows are better off in this respect than the rest. These poor folk are much looked down upon by their Spanish rulers, to conciliate whom they pretend to be good Catholics – in the old days of the Inquisition a not unnecessary affectation. They excel in many ingenious trades, best of all in horse dealing and thieving, professions nearly allied in most countries. Social pariahs as they have ever been, it need not excite any surprise that they are depraved and ignorant, though, as they have some noble qualities, they must be capable of great improvement when an age of wider sympathy and diminished race prejudice shall enable their neighbours to do justice to them.

They are at war with mankind because they have always been cruelly oppressed and ill-treated; but as in our own country a George Smith of Coalville and a George Borrow in Spain have found the gipsy character well repay the efforts made to improve it, we may fairly hope Christianity will ultimately conquer even this stubborn race. They are light-hearted, clever, courteous, and forgiving, generous, and kind even, to strangers in distress; great lovers of Nature, and full of affection for dumb creatures; surely in such a race there must be the material for improvement!

Rico, the gipsy king, soon became warmly attached to Elsworth, who spent many a pleasant hour in his sooty hut; pigs, fowls, and children wallowed and grovelled together in the mud-floored cabin, which was more suggestive of the Green Isle than of lordly Spain.

It was worth a journey to Granada to hear and see Rico play the guitar. The instrument only really lives in Spain, elsewhere it is but a feeble, voiceless toy; here it speaks, declaims, rouses and fires the brain, but then that is because the performer and the instrument become one. Rico’s guitar was part of himself, not only the strings but the body of the thing.

Often he would gather round him some of the young men and women of the colony, who would accompany his playing with plantive, weird singing and hand-clapping, in perfect tune, strange Eastern dances, with wild gesticulation and choruses which seemed reminiscences of ancient Greece. In return Elsworth, with hearty, manly sympathy, would recite some sweet narrative from the Gospels, and win his way to the hearts of these poor people by stories of the Saviour’s love.

Amulets, charms, fetishes, all these they knew. How the King of Heaven loved the despised Romany people, this was a strange thing to them which the Englishmen had come to teach. But it touched their hearts, poor outcasts!

When he had completed the translation of the Gospel of St. Luke into their language, they would listen with apparent interest to his reading by hours together. This was not the sort of Christianity that had before been presented to them. In its grand simplicity and manifest adaptation to the wants of these wandering children of Nature, surely here if anywhere, was the ideal religion for them; and as for their teacher, who lived their life and proved in a hundred ways his devotion to their interests, who showed that he loved these people, outcast and despised as they were, because of his honour to them as children of the same Father whom he loved, surely they were bound to treat his mission with respect.

And so four years had gone by. He had journeyed with the gipsies into many parts of Spain, but had always returned to Granada as his home, as the centre for his work and life interest.

How real and earnest a life he was living now! On this lofty height overlooking the historic scenes which had occupied so large a space in the annals of the past, what wonder if to an ardent poetic mind, romantic yet intensely practical, there often came, in moments of deep sympathy with mankind born of the love of God, high aspirations after noble deeds, and the determination, when his hour came, to go down into the arena and bear his part manfully in the fight! No, Elsworth was not skulking in idle retirement; not shirking his share of work; but because of a deep conviction that there was work for him to do which required his retirement to fit him for it he stayed, and did what lay to his hand, and waited for the summons.

The life of the hermits of the Theban Desert was a violation of common sense and true religion, inasmuch as it was all preface and no book; all preparation and girding on of armour, and no work; all tuning of instruments, and no music. The great wonder is, how the fanatics could have stood it so long.

Elsworth found that doctors were not held in nearly such high esteem in Spain as in England. They pursued the barbaric methods of treatment which were in vogue here at the beginning of this century, and which, if followed now, would subject the practitioner to a trial for manslaughter. Spain is so far behind the rest of Europe in everything, that it can easily be imagined how perilous it is for an invalid to fall into the hands of the sangrados even of the present day. The Spaniards are celebrated for their proverbs, not a few of which are aimed at the doctors. A popular rhyme goes like this: —

“And, doctor, do you really thinkThat asses’ milk I ought to drink?It cured yourself, I grant it true;But then ’twas mother’s milk to you!”

His fourth autumn had been passed in Spain, when another terrible epidemic of cholera broke out in Granada and other cities of Andalusia. Now he seemed to learn why he had been sent, hither. Now he could test the reality of his conversion. Now he would realise the dignity of his calling and the strength of his humanity. And he did not flinch.

His skill in sanitary matters and his surgical knowledge stood him in good stead. A good head for mechanics, much common sense, and a readiness of resource had already enabled him to save many of his Gitano friends from the hospitals they so much dreaded. He could mend their broken limbs with extemporised splints, reduce dislocations, and dress wounds antiseptically; and by cheering them by the infusion of his own light-heartedness, shorten their period of convalescence. To be sure, they had their own well-tried methods of cure, which were not so contemptible, though unrecognised in the schools. Having small faith in drugs, and smaller still in their wholesale administration by ignorant and unthinking practitioners, his medicine chest seldom needed replenishing. He valued his opium (Mash Allah, the gift of God, the Turks call it), but administered it with scrupulous care. Quinine was indispensable, and a dozen other well-tried remedies enabled him to work many a cure. But cold water and fresh air, wholesome food and temperance, want few aids from medicine for the ills of man. The wiser the physician the fewer the drugs, and by the length of your doctor’s prescription you may estimate the shallowness of his pretence to wisdom.

Sanitary engineers have done so much for the improvement of the health of towns, that the low death-rate in London and other English cities is more to be attributed to their agency than to improved methods of medical treatment. The wonder is that Spain and Italy are not continually decimated by pestilence. We may see what was the state of England in the time of the Black Death and the Great Plague by the condition of Naples and Granada under recent cholera visitations; the most elementary sanitary precautions being not only neglected but apparently impossible of comprehension by the people generally, so that the soil is always ready for the seeds of disease.

Elsworth was in robust health and vigour while he lived at Granada. Every morning he took two hours’ exercise on his bicycle into the open country of the Vega. His daily bath, the simplicity of his diet, his entire abstention from alcohol, and his scrupulous care to drink no water which he had not himself carefully boiled and filtered, with his cheerful, well-occupied mind, prevented him from taking any complaint during his work amongst the sick. He was well received by the poor folk he visited; and though the local doctors and priests looked coldly on his work, he had no difficulty in finding cases neglected by both, where his services were eagerly welcomed. Ho found amongst the very poor a strange prejudice against the doctors, who were ignorantly accused of giving the disease to the people to lessen the population. This seems to have had its origin in the inoculations practised by a disciple of Pasteur, and which undoubtedly did cause many deaths. There is such a widespread dislike of the priests among Spanish men, not altogether to be marvelled at by those who know the country, that the religious ministrations of this young English surgeon were often acceptable where the public functionary would have had scant courtesy. The authorities of the town recognised his work, and gave him permission to act as a medical man when they had satisfied themselves as to his qualifications. He attempted no concealment. Why should he? The British vice-consul of the city, a wealthy old Scotchman, the head of a firm of mining engineers, soon became a good friend to him. He was a Presbyterian of the good old school, with convictions about the Man of Sin and the Scarlet Lady, and loved Spain chiefly for the lead his firm extracted from the bowels of her mountains. Being a man of considerable standing in the city, and withal highly respected for his probity and charity, he had no difficulty in making easy the sort of work Elsworth aspired to do in the public service.

Naturally the authorities did not at first relish suggestions from a foreigner about improved drainage and water supply, though when they came to know the clever young surgeon, and had listened to his sensible proposals anent accumulations of refuse and dust, they gradually adopted many of his suggestions. Daily he spent many hours visiting amongst the most poverty stricken and dirty inhabitants. He spent the greater part of his income in helping his patients with suitable food and clothing. His missionary work was done by a few kind words here and there; with loving counsels and the sympathy which comes with a sense of the higher relationship of man to man through the All-Father, he won his way to the hearts of all. Virtue went out of him, and health and peace seemed to follow his steps. He was as much at home with the Catholic people of Granada as he would have been in the courts and alleys of London; he was as welcome in the homes of the atheist and gipsy, the red Republican and anarchist, as with the family of the Presbyterian vice-consul; and all because the pervading sense of God’s love for man had taken possession of his life. His sympathies were too wide for the influence of bigotry; he was as a traveller from a far country, who has long been homeless and a wanderer, not at all in the humour to trouble himself with the squabbles of his vestry, or the quarrels of the political clubs of the town he has come back to rest in.

Elsworth had recovered the lost idea of a loving God and Saviour of men. What to him did it matter, all these hair-splitting dogmas and wranglings of theologians? the recovered treasure was too precious to neglect for the ornaments of the casket in which it was contained.

So he daily went about doing good. By his constant visitation of the people he was able to detect the earliest stages of the pestilence which was destroying so many; then by prompt and judicious treatment he was often successful in arresting its progress. His fame spread, and he was often called in to attend rich sufferers, from whom he refused to take any fees, as he considered himself the servant of the poor. If they chose to make him presents, as they often did, he took them with the understanding that their gifts should be devoted to charitable purposes.

He often went to Mr. MacAlister’s home, at the Vice-Consulate, close by the cathedral. The old gentleman was rather afraid of infection; but as the doctor always changed his clothing before paying visits to his friends, he took his word for it that there was no cause for alarm.

He rented at a very low rate, through the kindness of a member of the municipal council, an old monastery which had been taken by the Government on the expulsion of the monks, and was now let to a furniture dealer; and turned it into a small but serviceable hospital for cholera patients. Funds were readily provided for its support, and there was no difficulty in inducing sufferers to avail themselves of it, as was the case with the great hospitals of the place, which they dreaded to enter. They knew they would be safe in Doctor Elsworth’s hands; he wanted to try no experiments upon them, and was not (as they foolishly thought the other doctors were) in league with the Government for getting rid of them.

Mr. MacAlister’s daughters nobly came forward and helped in the nursing. They found amongst their English and American friends resident in the town abundant means for carrying on the plan, without any Spanish assistance in this branch of the work. Spanish ladies, even if available, would have been of little service. Even Spanish nuns are not very valuable as nurses, and the best Catholic charities are recruited from France. Spanish women can do the devotional part of the work, they say; but that is about all they are good for. The bringing up of a Spanish woman tends to make her ornamental merely, and surely she is of the loveliest of her sex. She spends the greater part of her day in bed, rises and adorns herself for dinner; then the tertulia, with its music and dancing winds up her waking hours, and by midnight she is again in bed. This is poor material for making sick nurses or sisters of mercy.

They had only twenty beds in Elsworth’s hospital. Their principal disinfectant was fresh air, for our surgeon was not greatly in love with carbolic acid and the other disinfecting fetishes, which are probably about as powerful for evil and powerless for good as any which the African venerates.

CHAPTER XXX.

SISTER AGNES LEAVES ST. BERNARD’S

So all the more we need be strongAgainst this false and seeming right;Which none the less is deadly wrongBecause it glitters, clothed in light.Procter.

The prince who asked, “Who is she?” when anything went wrong in his kingdom, was not far out in his estimate of the power of woman for mischief; but he would have been wiser had he asked the same question when he heard of any new movement for good. The fact is that, as Coventry Patmore says, women have the power, would they but use it, to make “brutes men, and men divine.” When the selfishness, the thoughtless cruelty, and the greed of men have culminated in some deep-seated, persistent social wrong, it may be taken for granted that the evil will not be uprooted till a woman’s whole-hearted, unselfish courage has taken it in hand. Mr. Ruskin somewhere complains that “no one pays the least attention to what he says on social topics, except a few nice girls, and they can do nothing.” He should not have said that, because he knows better – no one more certainly than he – that his “few nice girls” will bring to pass all that is good in his teaching sooner or later.

Women mend what men mar; – everything, from our linen to our laws.

Sister Agnes knew all this – knew that it was just as certainly some woman’s place to set to work and remedy this shameful abuse of Charity’s holiest work, as it would be her work to restore peace and order to a home wrecked by a man’s selfishness and violence. The more she thought of the matter, the more indignant she felt that no man could be brought to see the awful wrong of exploiting the miseries and diseases of the poor for the purpose of adorning the brows of men with academic laurels. Surely never in the history of this world was so cruel a mockery of charity! Asked for bread, to give a stone! What was this but to give disease for health, maiming for cure, torture for ease, and death for life? And then to go round to those who, in the name of the Healer, were ever ready to sacrifice their substance and give alms out of their penury, for the means to bring more victims to the altar of their Kali! Did not every sister and nurse in the place, with feminine penetration, see through all these shams? Did they not revolt in their souls, day by day and hour by hour, at this mockery of mercy, till, by long use, they forgot to feel the wrong? She had mentioned her misgivings to many men, clergymen chiefly, who saw it all – saw just where the mischief lay, but thought it inseparable from the work that had to be done; knew of its existence, but could see no remedy for it. They declared that every good thing in this world must be bought with a price. But was not this price too high to pay? They did not know, they did not think anybody could even set about estimating that. They did not like to encourage thought or discussion of the question – money was hard enough to get for the hospitals as it was. Breathe but the least on the idea of their utility, and the charitable public, all too ready to withhold its gifts, would cease to subscribe. Hospitals were costly things to establish, still costlier to maintain efficiently. “Let be,” they said; “we can do nothing.” Men always do talk like that in face of such difficulties, but, fortunately, their arguments never yet held back a woman who had set her heart on a great work of love.

Sister Agnes gradually evolved an idea of a great hospital richly endowed and well officered, ruled by a competent governing body, and animated throughout by one idea —to heal by the shortest and most effectual methods, the sufferers who sought its portals; to take as the guiding principle of all the work done there, not possibly better methods for better patients, but the best existing methods for the present occupants of its beds. The motto of the place to be, “Honour all men.” A revolution indeed! A work of such magnitude that its inception seemed Quixotic!

Things, however, had come to this pass that she could no longer retain her position at St. Bernard’s; and feeling that she could do nothing there to elaborate her scheme, she left the hospital, and took time to consider what her next step should be. She did not leave a bit too soon; things had been rather unpleasant of late. There were several patients who, at a hint from her, had taken themselves off from St. Bernard’s with all their limbs about them, who would have gone out minus one or other of these useful appendages had they remained much longer, and the loss of these valuable opportunities had very properly been charged to Sister Agnes’s account. She was accused of not showing sufficient interest in the welfare of the place.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE GOSPEL OF WORK

God says, “SweatFor foreheads;” men say, “Crowns:” and so we are crowned;Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel,Which snaps with a secret spring.Elizabeth B. Browning.If to the city sped – what waits him there?To see profusion that he must not share;To see ten thousand baneful arts combined,To pamper luxury and thin mankind.Goldsmith (“Deserted Village”).

What is the perfect life for a Christian man or woman? It was settled once for all by our Lord. “Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor” – and live in a cave, on the top of a column, in a monastic cell, or beg for daily bread from door to door? Would that fulfil the command? The nineteenth century has no place for St. Simeon’s Pillar; the cells of the monks are turned to other uses than that of contemplation, which is not quite in the way of the age of steam and the telegraph; and begging and alms-giving are denounced by students of social economy. What is the precise application, then, of our Saviour’s teaching to the present day? Though deaths from starvation and terrible tales of privation are not uncommon in our great cities, and the condition of the unskilled working classes is particularly unsatisfactory, there is no question that our poor even at their worst are better off by far than those of our Lord’s time. Admitting the work that remains to be done in helping to raise the lower sections of society, it is in a moral rather than a material direction that our efforts must be exerted; and though our Lord’s command to sell all and feed the poor is not perhaps to be interpreted literally, because the literal is not now the highest interpretation of the injunction, yet never was there a time when it was more the duty of Christian people to make great, ay, the greatest sacrifices for their fellow-men than the present. The law provides against the starvation of any human being dwelling in our midst; but it is souls rather than bodies which languish for food, and are fain to be filled with carrion. The separation which many years has been going on between class and class; the locating the workers in quarters given over to dirt, squalor, and dullness; the exodus of the cultivated minds to more congenial sections of our greater towns, where the signs of labour and the noise of work cannot disturb or annoy them; the drawing off the classes from the masses, depriving the poor man of the society, the encouragement, the teaching, the example, the brightness, the wealth, and the culture of the more leisured – it is this which is slowly but surely working, not alone the degradation of the deserted people, but a terrible punishment for the deserters. There is not a work of art, not a lofty aspiration, not a burst of song, not a beautiful face, nor a well-stored intellect, but is part of the heritage of the poor. We have as much right to cut off the poor man’s oxygen or his nitrogen as to deprive him of any of the elements needful for the nourishment of his soul.