Doctor in the House Read Free Page A

time afterwards how he had been able to discover from these questions that I had the attributes of a successful doctor, but I later found out that even this brief interview was superfluous, as the Dean always took the advice of his old secretary and told applicants this man disliked the look of that there were no vacancies.

2
    The medical school of St Swithin’s hospital was an offshoot of the main buildings and had its own entrance on the main road. It was a tall, gloomy structure that held three floors of laboratories, an anatomical dissection room, a lecture theatre that was clothed in perpetual dusk, and the smelliest lavatories in the district.
    The school had been built by the richest brewer in London, who was happily knocked over by a hansom outside the hospital gates one slippery winter’s morning in 1875. He was restored to health and normal locomotion in the wards, and to show his gratitude he purchased his peerage the following year by founding the school. The place was now far too old, dark, and small for the requirements of the students, but as the hospital could see little prospect of the accident being repeated it was impossible to tear it down.
    At the beginning of October thirty new students collected there for a lecture of welcome and introduction by the Dean. Carrying a new and shiny loose-leaf folder under my arm, I walked up the stone steps for the first time and into the dingy, small entrance hall. The brewer’s name was carved in stone over the doorway to indicate the hospital’s enduring gratitude, and was reflected in green and gold across the face of the King George public house opposite. Below his chiselled title were the serpents entwined round the winged staff, the doctors’ universal trademark, and below that Hippocrates’ discouraging aphorism ‘The Art is Long.’
    The hall, which was painted in yellow and green, contained a small kiosk bearing the word ‘Enquiries’ in which a porter had firmly shut himself by pulling down the glass window, turning his back on it, and reading the Daily Mirror with undistractable attention. There was a short row of clothes-hooks as heavy as an orchard in August, and a long notice board thickly covered by overlapping sheets of paper.
    I glanced at the board as I passed, feeling some faint obligation to do so. The notices were an untidy jumble of typewritten official instructions about lectures, examinations, and so forth, and scraps of paper torn from notebooks scrawled with students’ writing. These indicated the pathetic undercurrents of medical school life as much as the agony column of The Times reflects those below the existence of the middle class. The first to catch my eye was in green ink, and said angrily ‘Will the gentleman (underlined four times heavily) who took my umbrella from the physiology lab last Thursday bring it back? How can I afford a new one?’ Next to it was a faded invitation for two students to make up a party to dissect an abdomen in Edinburgh during the vacation, adding temptingly ‘Digs and abdomen fixed up. Good pubs.’ There were lists of text-books for sale, triumphantly set up by men who had passed their examinations and therefore had no necessity to learn anything else; several small earnest printed appeals for support of the local Student Christian Association; and a number of unfulfilled wants, from a disarticulated foot to a cheap motor-bike.
    A hand on the wall pointed upwards ‘To the Lecture Theatre.’ The way was by a thin iron spiral staircase that ended in darkness. I mounted it, and found myself against a dull brown door attached to a spring that creaked violently as it opened.
    The door led to the back of a steep tier of narrow wooden benches rising from the lecturer’s desk like a football stand. Behind the desk were three large blackboards screwed to the walls, which were otherwise panelled with stained perpendicular planks. The roof was lost in a criss-cross of thin iron girders through which half