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
A great surgeon achieves a brilliant success in an operation which
sends a man away from the wards to his own home restored in health and
limbs to his family and his work. It is the hospital which gets the
credit, and the credit is sufficient to atone for many of the maimings
and other unfortunate terminations of a score of cases, which are
looked upon as failures, not of much greater consequence than Beau
Brummel’s cravats cast aside on his dressing-table. It will not do to
be too hard on the failures. Even Professor Holloway did not publish
_them_. The advertisements of quack and royal surgeon are alike in this
respect at least, that they do not go into any such unnecessary details!
But oh, the spoiled cravats! condemned to drag out a wretched existence
because they had the misfortune to be not only ignorant, and poor, and
powerless, but waste material used by St. Bernard’s in the attempt to
make of any person able to pay its fees a competent healer of diseases.
Not enough was it that they were born into a hard and cruel world,
heavily handicapped by feeble frames and badly developed brains,
without education or any of the means of lifting themselves from the
slough of their environments, but it was also required of them by our
advanced civilization that they should yield up their poor bodies,
which were enough like better people’s frames for the purpose, to
become “teaching stuff” for classes at a medical school.
It was in Lindsay Street, and with Mrs. Jemima White, that Elsworth
went to lodge. He had abundant strength of mind, and it was little to
him that his fellow-boarders were a rather noisy set. He had full
control of himself, and did not permit them to influence him unduly in
the matter of sprees. He settled down steadily to his work, and did not
find his friends interfere with him much when they saw his tastes were
not quite their own; on the contrary, they rather respected him for his
diligence, in which there was not the least element of the prig. As for
his religion,—for Elsworth came to St. Bernard’s deeply imbued with
the religious spirit,—they smiled at him when he talked of it, which
was but seldom, as who should say, “Poor innocent! you will outgrow all
that quickly here, and find faith and the scalpel, dogma and the
microscope, go ill together!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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