The Man from Archangel, and Other Tales of AdventureDoyle, Arthur Conan
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The Man from Archangel, and Other Tales of Adventure
Doyle, Arthur Conan
Adventure stories, English; Physicians -- Fiction
He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move
round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his own bewilderment,
in the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been
much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it
than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when it
was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when
instruments were in a rudimentary state and when men learned to trust
more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in the
palm, tapering in the fingers, "with an eye at the end of each." I shall
not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the
County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible
moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr. Winter,
whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into the
wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about nine
inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it.
"It's always well to bring one in your waistcoat pocket," said he with a
chuckle, "but I suppose you youngsters are above all that."
We made him President of our Branch of the British Medical Association,
but he resigned after the first meeting. "The young men are too much for
me," he said. "I don't understand what they are talking about." Yet his
patients do very well. He has the healing touch--that magnetic thing
which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident fact
none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more
hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust does
a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. "Tut, tut, this
will never do!" he cries, as he takes over a new case. He would shoo
death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen. But when the
intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves more slowly and
the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of more avail than
all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his hand as if the
presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage to face the
change; and that kindly, wind-beaten face has been the last earthly
impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown.
When Dr. Patterson and I, both of us young, energetic, and up-to-date,
settled in the district, we were most cordially received by the old
doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of some of his
patients. The patients themselves, however, followed their own
inclinations, which is a reprehensible way that patients have, so that
we remained neglected with our modern instruments and our latest
alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the
country-side. We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time,
in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help
commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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