St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical StudentBerdoe, Edward
General
St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student
Berdoe, Edward
Medical students -- Fiction
Mr. Crowe was full of the latter country, and the backward condition of
everything there. He found nothing doing of importance for research but
some Pasteur inoculations. He had visited many of the Spanish hospitals
and schools of medicine, but everything was backward in comparison with
France or Germany. Tho Spaniards, he thought, were unwilling to embrace
the new theories which were helping the world forward. He had only met
three physiologists who lived up to the true ideal of a modern
scientist. One at Salamanca, who, having discovered the bacillus of
phthisis in the sputa of a patient, had inoculated with the germs one
of his own children several times, with a view to watching the rise and
progress of the disease. Another at Valladolid had carried out a long
series of experiments in brain localisation on a mule-driver who had
fallen over a precipice, and was taken to the hospital with a portion
of his brain exposed so conveniently that it could be galvanised as
readily as one of Professor Ferrier’s monkeys, and was consequently a
most valuable means of confirming that gentleman’s theories. The third
he met at Madrid, and he had done wonders at his hospital by ordering a
number of his patients, who were either cooks or butchers, to eat daily
a portion of raw beef (persons of these professions are usually quite
ready to do this), for the purpose of introducing into their systems
the parasite _Tænia mediocanellata_.
As epilepsy, hysteria, convulsions, and even insanity have been known
to follow the introduction of this interesting parasite into the human
body, it must be admitted that Professor Montijo was one of the heroic
school, and merited all Mr. Crowe’s eulogiums. Some of the alumni who
listened to these accounts of continental practice thought that the
first man was the only true hero of the lot. He, Abraham-like, had been
willing to sacrifice his own son “for the good of humanity.” As for the
mule-driver and his exposed brain, they had done quite as good things
at St. Bernard’s more than once; while in regard to the hydatid and
tape-worm germs in beef and pork, that was an every-day business down
in the out-patient department, and a very meek sort of experiment for a
St. Bernard’s man.
Dr. Stanforth told his class a good thing from Milan, where a
tremendous experiment, involving risk to the lives of several women,
had been tried by a friend of his at the Maternity Hospital. He
admitted it was rather hard on the women, who had sought the comforts
of the hospital for quite other reasons; but it was a point which
needed clearing up, and the learned professor, with the unwitting
assistance of eight patients (and eight other lives especially
protected by the laws of God and man, he forgot to add), had settled
the question on behalf of therapeutics for ever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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