Two years had passed away since Elsworth’s disappearance, and a little party of house physicians and surgeons—all young men and recently qualified—were sitting round the roaring fire in the snug quarters of the senior house surgeon at our hospital, discussing the sad fate of their old comrade. Young Harvey Bingley—a thoughtful and cultivated man, who, besides passing his exams, with credit, found time and inclination for literary pursuits, and especially loved to dig into Robert Browning’s poetry and extract a nugget from time to time—propounded the theory that perhaps Elsworth had gone off like Waring in Browning’s poem. Nobody saw the allusion, because nobody there knew anything of Browning; but Bingley was always worth listening to when he got on his hobby, so he was required to explain.

“Well, you see, the poem opens with the question,—

“He is described in the poem as walking with two or three friends one snowy night in December, when suddenly he was missed from the little company of students, who were returning home from a supper party, and none of them saw him again, nor could anything be learned of his whereabouts till years after, when one of his friends, sailing by Trieste, caught a glimpse of the lost Waring’s face under a great grass hat, in a fruit-boat, offering to trade with the English brig: caught that glimpse, and nothing more, as the boat which bore him went off—

“How romantic!” exclaimed several of the party.

“Yes,” said the junior house physician; “very like young Sapsford; he disappeared just that way, after a supper party, and was not heard of till several days after, and then he was found in a boat off Margate jetty, with his landlady’s daughter!”

“Shut up!” cried Dr. Aubrey; “you’ve no poetry or sentiment in you—not a bit. You are saturated with ‘Mark Twain,’ and it’s blasphemy to quote Browning in your ribald hearing!”

“Do you think Elsworth has gone into the fruit business ‘in the rosy half of the sky?’” meekly asked Maberley the dresser.

“I’ve no idea,” said Bingley; “but I have known things quite as strange as that. By the way, you were all so anxious to laugh at my poetry that you didn’t wait to hear the dÉnouement.”

“Oh, isn’t it over?” asked a groggy individual on the sofa, smoking a churchwarden. “How could he get back out of the rosy sky?”

“That I can’t say; but he did, and is now living in a pretty villa on Hampstead Heath, is very fat and jolly, and sketches in fine weather ‘bits’ which he exhibits at the Academy.”

“Then I say it’s a beastly shame,” cried Ryder, the “Resident Acc.,” “to come to a public place like Hampstead and dissipate all that beautiful poetry and rend asunder those rosy skies and appear as a fat sketcher amongst donkey boys and nursemaids, to say nothing of girls’ schools. It’s indecent, and Robert Browning ought to go at him for damages. I would! ‘Avatar’ indeed.”

“Now, joking apart,” said Dr. Aubrey, “don’t you think poor Elsworth got a sudden sense of disgust with his rackety life, which was always, I thought, rather assumed—never sat upon him quite naturally—and in a moment resolved to cut it all? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that he had settled down in some quiet nook abroad, and was leading a philosophical life. Do you remember Bartley Coleman? You do, don’t you, Fourneaux?—he was of your year. You remember how promising he was? We all made sure he would take the medical scholarship. One fine morning he was missed, and nobody heard of him here till Dr. Sales went into a little grocer’s shop in a Scotch village for some fish-hooks, and was served by the missing Coleman. His father had become bankrupt while he was a student, had a fit of apoplexy soon after, and died, leaving a widow and five girls unprovided for. Poor Coleman heard the call of duty, laid down the scalpel and took up the cheese-cutter, and so supported his mother and his sisters. Noble wasn’t it?”

“Oh, I say, Aubrey,” said Maberley, “you don’t mean to imply that Elsworth is keeping a chandler’s shop?”

“I imply nothing. I say we know very little of the under-currents of half the men’s lives we are familiar with; we see the surface-water and what floats on it; that is all. The wonder to me is how we keep between the banks as well as we do. Some from inclination, others from duty, more from defective control, get away from the old course, wander off down the rapids, under the rocks, and disappear. Is it any marvel? For my own part, there are times when I long to cast off the restrictions of your so-called civilized existence, and go with a gun or a lasso to the Pampas and the virgin forests.”

“Yes, all very fine, and make the welkin ring with cries for your slippers and your grog when tired and heated with the chase. After a very few months of that sort of work, the fit would cool down; and the next thing that the world would see of you, you would be dining with your father at the Fishmongers’ banquet, eating your turtle and drinking your trÈs sec like the rest of the ‘domine diriges.’”

“I believe he has gone off with some girl,” said ugly little beetle-browed Mills, the clinical clerk; “or somebody’s wife more likely still.”

“Well, you may comfort yourself, Mills, that that indiscretion will never happen to you. I could believe it of a cash-box, but there isn’t a woman living who would elope with you—married or single. You will never create that scandal.”

At this moment a knock was heard at the door, and a nurse put her head into the room and, addressing one of the house surgeons, told him the patient Green, in Isabella ward, had consented to undergo the operation which he had suggested, and then added: “Sister says she thinks he is dying fast, and are you going to operate?”

“Going to operate! Rather think I was. Don’t you know, Nurse, this is my first capital operation? Do you think I am going to lose the chance?”

“Then, sir, Sister told me to ask you if I had better let the chaplain know?”

“Chaplain be hanged!” he cried. “Certainly not! It would only depress the poor devil. No! no! Plenty of brandy! Keep him up! Cheer him all you can; tell him it is only a trifling, every-day sort of affair, and he will be well in a jiffy. You may send for his wife.”

“Oh, sir, she has been waiting about the hospital all day.”

“All right, then! Now, gentlemen, to business. You shall see me do something pretty. Bishop says I may do it all myself as soon as the ether is given. Is Bishop in the wards?”

“No, I saw him in the pathologist’s room with Crowe an hour ago, and he said he should be here but part of the day. I’ll tell him, shall I?” asked a dresser.

“Do!”

The bell rang for the operation, to assemble the students, some of whom said “It was a beastly shame to torture a poor wretch who hadn’t a chance of getting over it.”

“Ah, you won’t talk like that when you are house surgeon (H.S. they always termed it) yourself. You will be glad to operate on your own father if you can’t get anybody else. Besides, what are hospitals for, if not to qualify us for our work? If people don’t want us to learn all we can from them, why don’t they stay at home and die? The parish doctor won’t disturb their latter moments with operations.”

And so, while the case was being discussed by the novelty-hunting lads, and the grim tools of the surgeons were being selected and placed on a pretty little table by the side of the couch in the theatre, and covered with a white napkin;—while the nurses were assembling who had to assist, and the surgeon refreshing his memory by a last peep at the text-book directing the steps of the operation;—while the poor patient, who, after much worrying, had at last consented to undergo what he was told was a trifling affair that would be certain to cure him—an agonised young woman, with a baby at her breast, was pacing up and down the courtyard of the “cathedral of surgery,” as the Sunday papers called it, feeling that her poor husband was fast leaving her and his little home, and much doubting if she should have given that young doctor her consent to cut and hack the sinking frame of the father of her babe. But what was she to do? Had not five well speaking, kind-looking gentlemen told her that very morning it was the only chance of saving him? Did not the pretty nurse and the ladylike sister urge her to do just whatever the doctor in charge of the case advised? There was only her own heart, her sad misgivings, standing between her and the operation that they said was to give her Jimmy back to health. She had yielded; it was to be done. She had seen him, and kissed him; but her heart told her she would see him and hear his voice no more in life.

A kind porter in the place let her sit down in his room and await the result. Before nightfall, she was a widow. The announcement was made to her by one of the dressers, who coupled his bad news with a request from the authorities for leave to make a post-mortem examination. For James Green had yet something to contribute to science and St. Bernard’s; he had given his life; had presented a rising young surgeon with his first opportunity for a great and interesting operation. He had still something more to bestow—his dead body. It was considered a grievous oversight, and a wrong to the institution, if a patient who had died there failed to make his or her appearance on the post-mortem table at four o’clock the next day, not only that it might be seen and demonstrated by skilled pathologists just where and how the operation had gone wrong, but for the sake of all the beautiful and instructive things that might be shown in brain, or heart, or lungs. For statistical purposes, for treatises being written, for papers for learned societies on all and every of the ailments of humanity, it was ill fortune to let a sectio cadaveris slip, as one never knew what one might be losing. They had an euphemistic way of asking the relatives’ permission for what they termed a “P.M.”

“You don’t object to a slight examination, do you, just to find out the real cause of death, so as to make the death certificate all right?”

Who could object? Few understood what it all meant, fewer thought they had any power to object; so the cases were rare where the ruse failed.

There is a widespread feeling amongst the people against post-mortem examinations. There is a vague apprehension that portions of their deceased friend’s anatomy may appear “in spirits in a vial,” in some museum or other. When the remains of the relative come back from the hospital, it is unpleasant to feel doubts as to their integrity. Visions of important portions of their internal economy lying perdu in back gardens of students’ lodgings, the prey of the too inquisitive cat or investigating terrier, are not altogether baseless. Hundreds of back gardens in London doubtless do contain such material, as we have frequent proof. Many thousands of museum shelves are loaded with preparations of such departed friends. It is doubtless, in the abstract, absurd to object to these common practices; but when it comes home to a mother to ask how she would like her dead child’s remains disposed of, it is perfectly natural, and not at all absurd, to suppose that with her whole heart, she would earnestly demand that they should be reverently interred in Christian ground, and be as little mutilated as possible.

The Jews are very reluctant to allow post-mortem examinations on their relatives; and, when such a thing is unavoidable, as by coroner’s order, an official from the synagogue is present to see that nothing is abstracted. It has often happened that the friends have discovered that portions of the corpse have been withheld or lost; and, as such detention of human remains is forbidden by law, the authorities have had to compensate the relatives by handsome sums towards the funeral expenses. Nevertheless, one shilling will still purchase a healthy, adult human brain to dissect quietly at home; and the emptiness of the dead person’s head is not always a cause of surprise. A judicious porter in the P.M. room has often found the cranial cavity a good receptacle for the liver, thus balancing matters comfortably.