In a few days, I had concluded my arrangements, and without a sigh or a tear of regret turned my back on my student home, and sought my new location, which I reached without further adventure. CUPPING AN IRISHMAN. |During my last year's attendance on the lectures, I became the inmate, for the purpose of walking the wards, of a certain marine hospital, situated on a certain western river--of which Randolph has recorded his opinion--where the patients receive--paradoxical as it may seem--the kindest, yet the grossest treatment imaginable. There were four or five brother “Rats” besides myself residing in the hospital, all candidates for graduation, and consequently all desirous of obtaining sufficient medical lore to prevent us from being thrown higher at the “ides of March.” Never before--at least by any of us--was such assiduity displayed; so much mental pabulum devoured; so many of the latent energies of studiousness called into play, as then. No case, however disgusting, was put in the objective; no symptom, however trivial, obscure, or mysterious, could pass unnoticed; and the proudest soar of the bird of Jove would have passed unheeded, had a sore of another description occurred coincidently. Fingers which the previous session had never been employed in higher surgery than forking a sleepy chum, or picking needlepoints out of a pretty seamstress's hand, now gracefully adapted the pliant bandage to the fractured limb, or drew the ruby with the lancet keen. No longer the sweet vision of midnight oyster-suppers illumined the mental horizon, obscured by the listening to of six long lectures daily. No longer at the “wee short hours avant the twal” was our Ganymede summoned to evoke the spirit of the whiskey jug. No longer musingly reclining did we watch the airy genii of the best cigar, borne up heavenward on the curling chariots of their consuming earthly tabernacles. No longer--pshaw! to comprise the whole, we were studying for our degrees, preparing for the opportunity of passing our opinion on the question, “Whether the sheepskin of a young graduate, applied to his back, would be a contiguous or a continuous membrane?” Among the rest was Charley L------, a young fellow of considerable talents--well aware, by the bye, of their possession--who having heard of my reputation for cupping, was not long in bantering me to a trial of skill, having some pretensions that way himself. “Tensas,” said he one night, when we had all assembled in the apothecary's shop of the establishment, to compare notes and discuss the day, “do you think you could cup an Irishman?” “Cup an Irishman!” repeated I, “yes, or a Dutchman, or an eel, or a buck running, or a streak of slow lightning, or anything that wears four square inches of skin. But why do you ask, Charley?”