Brown scratched his head with the handle of his scalpel. “Well, I’m in an absolute fog. You’d better take this job on to-morrow, and I’ll do the reading. What does ‘cutaneous’ mean, anyway?” “Cutis,” thought Edwin, “Skin.” After all, it seemed, the dead languages had their uses. By this time he had recovered from the first shock of his distaste; he was getting used to the odour of the room, and so, a moment later, he and Martin strolled over to a table at which one of the prosectors was engaged in preparing a specimen for the Dean’s lectures. It was almost pleasant to watch the deftness with which he defined the line of a pink, injected artery, wielding his scalpel as delicately and as surely as a painter at work on a canvas. They watched him working in silence. “Nice part, isn’t it?” he said with condescension. “Yes,” said Martin, “this sort of thing must be rattling good practice for surgery.” “Oh, surgery’s quite different,” said the prosector. “This is a lazy job. There’s no hurry about it. This fellow won’t bleed to death.” So Edwin and Denis Martin began to work on their Upper, and the dissecting room that had been an abode of horror and an incentive to philosophy became no more than the scene of their daily labours. Edwin accepted his new callousness without regret for the sensitive perceptions that he had lost, for he saw that his heart and his imagination were not really less tender for the change; they had merely come to a working agreement with the demands of his new life, and had attained this satisfactory state not so much by a suppression of sensibility as by an insistence on the objective aspects of his work. This fact explained to him, at the very beginning of his career, the fallacy of medical callousness in relation to pain or physical distress. He saw, on reflection, that if a doctor exaggerated the importance of subjective sensations in his patient he might well lose sight of his own object, which was nothing more nor less than removing their cause: that, for example, the fear of death, the anxiety of relatives and the patient’s own perception of intolerable pain, were of infinitely less importance to the physician than the presence of a focus of danger in the patient’s appendix. A sustained objectivity was the only attitude of mind in which a doctor could live at the same time happily and efficiently. The only feature of the dissecting room that now seemed objectionable was the smell of the powerful antiseptic that was used for preserving the subjects. For a week or two Edwin was conscious of its pervading every moment of his life, his train-journeys, his meal-times, even his sleep. But in a little time his olfactory nerves became so used to it that they discounted its presence, and the fact that his neighbours in railway carriages did not seem to shrink from him, convinced him that after all he did not go about the world saturated in odours of the charnel house.