He was happier using the knife than in trying to save the limb.—Tennyson. And whom have ye knowen die honestly Without help of the Poticary?—Heywood. Dr. Stanforth was considered a model hospital physician—for the students. They were ever the first in his thoughts; to touch one of them was to touch the apple of his eye. He lived for them (and by them), yet he never allowed any of his patients to suspect anything of the kind. There was nothing he grudged his pupils, and they consequently worshipped him. To serve any of his boys he would sacrifice the feelings of any interesting bit of “clinical material” that came in his way, and he boasted that he turned out more proficient practitioners than any one of his colleagues. His methods were startling even to them, and many were the wrinkles he put them up to. His fame in his speciality—gynÆcology, was so great, and his really remarkable abilities so well recognised, that nothing he did, startling though it was to the outside world, diminished the crowds of patients who flocked to his consulting rooms. Of course he had the bonhomie and social tact that are needful in attaching young men to a teacher; he was, in addition, able to prove to them that by attending his practice they were acquiring a practical knowledge of their work which they could obtain in no other way. Dr. Stanforth held all his patients at the disposal of any pupil of his who desired to do or see something new. “Do At what awful cost all this was to the “material” he never troubled to estimate. The scandal at last got too strong for St. Bernard’s, and he was soon promoted “out of the opportunities of his art”—as he complained. “Sister, let us have another patient!” said Dr. Stanforth, on one occasion, just as one might say, “Hand me another chair,” or “Bring me another book.” It was in the private operating room at St. Bernard’s, screened off from the ward specially set apart for women. The assistant physician of this important department had invented a new apparatus for administering anÆsthetics, and it was tried that day for the first time—tried on hospital patients first, of course. It promised materially to assist in bringing the patient under the influence of the anÆsthetic with rapidity and comfort. Being a complicated machine, with various ingeniously constructed valves, it was not by any means an easy thing to manage, and the least error might have fatal consequences; it would never do, therefore, to use such a thing out of doors till all its bearings Dr. Stanforth was an amiable creature, who lived and worked for, and devoted all his energies to his “boys,” as he called his students; for them he spared his patients neither shame nor pang; for them his beds were occupied by so much “teaching stuff.” He was skilful to cure, but at St. Bernard’s he often forebore to cure too rapidly, lest the “pretty case” might get well before all his boys had had their fill of it. It was far better, he used to say, that a patient should “bide a wee,” if any interest attached to her case, than that any budding obstetrician should leave the hospital imperfectly equipped with all the weapons he required. “Have as many patients as you want, my lad,” he said; “let us get the thing right while we are about it.” “The thing” was the new apparatus, and on its first trial on patient number one, had narrowly escaped sending her to kingdom come by suffocation. She appeared to be “going off lovely,” as funny Mr. Philips said, till Dr. Stanforth, suddenly turning round in the middle of a droll story about his friend “Wales and the actress,” seized the patient’s hand, and declared she was “going” in quite another sense. Artificial respiration was performed, and the woman restored to life and consciousness. It was generous not to subject her to any further experiment that day, and she was sent back to her bed, which she had not left for any benefit likely, under any circumstances, to accrue to herself, while the instrument which had so terribly failed was carefully examined for the cause of the mishap. On taking it to pieces, a mechanical genius amongst the students found that a valve had How difficult a task it would be to convince the world of all this! What an Augean stable for a weak woman to cleanse! Then again nothing annoys the public more than to open the doors of its whited sepulchres. Of course, it was no use to condemn the present system without putting something better in its place. The workhouse infirmary was far better in one sense; there, the object was to help the patient to get well as speedily as possible, and take himself off the books; but there attaches a stigma to the infirmary from which the hospital is free, yet the hospital must be reformed on the model, in some respects, of the infirmaries. The sister was a clever woman, a woman of ample means, and with great influence; why should not this be her life-work to found a new order of charity? It had been the work of many a noble woman to do greater things than this, and with apparently less foothold; and that night, before she went to rest, she prayed that strength and wisdom might be given to her to carry out the scheme which was taking hold upon her heart. “I shall want half a million of money to make a beginning. What is that? A man dies, and leaves a quarter of a million to a college of anatomy and surgery, to be spent in skeletons and pickled specimens of curious fish and odd deformities. Many a man’s picture gallery has had that spent upon it; it might buy a moderately good ironclad; would make a mile or two of suburban railway, and execute a few hundred yards of submarine tunnel. Somebody will come along who will see with me that humanity and cruelty, whom God hath disjoined eternally, shall not be forced into unholy union. Let me be the Joan of Arc to fight this out.” But not yet. She must arrange her plan of campaign, collect her forces. So enormous a task must demand an adequate inception, and though she shrank from nothing, she ventured nothing rashly. |