Doctor On The Boil Read Free Page B

awesome.’ Sir Lancelot paused to cough. ‘Then you will remember that the hospital’s physicians and surgeons, though retired from active work, are fully entitled to return, to take over the care of such patients in the wards as they feel inclined to, with no questions asked. Clearly, our founders felt it desirable for the long experience of a retired surgeon never to be wasted–’
    ‘Lancelot!’ cried the dean.
    ‘Of course, in those days people were always retiring to serve the Queen or explore the American colonies–’
    ‘That right has never been exercised in the entire history of St Swithin’s,’ exclaimed the dean, turning pink.
    Sir Lancelot fixed him with his eye. ‘Well, it is now, old cock.’
    ‘But…but…this is outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. What do you imagine in this day and age the patients would say? Supposing you walked into Professor Bingham’s ward and simply told one of them that you were going to remove his gallbladder–’
    ‘As my fees used to be the highest in London, they’d be getting better value for their National Health Insurance stamps.’
    The dean slapped his desk-top. ‘I shall have the charter amended.’
    ‘That’ll need an Act of Parliament. Ask the Prime Minister if you like, though there may possibly be more important things on his mind.’
    ‘Really, Lancelot, this is most unreasonable of you,’ the dean continued angrily. ‘It’ll raise all manner of problems with the Ministry. And just at the time I particularly want to keep my nose clean because–’
    He stopped. ‘Yes?’ demanded Sir Lancelot.
    ‘I happen to have mislaid my handkerchief. No, no, it’ll never do.’
    ‘We’ll see about that. Meanwhile, I think I’ll have a prowl round the old place. See you in the ward after lunch. And do provide a decent-sized jar for a specimen, there’s a good chap. From some of the receptacles you physicians produce, you seem to imagine a camel could widdle through the eye of a needle.’

3
    ‘Good grief,’ muttered Sir Lancelot Spratt. ‘Ruddy sacrilege.’
    He felt a lump in his throat. A tear formed in the corner of his eye, ran down his rugged cheek and soaked into his beard. He dabbed it away with the red-and-white handkerchief and adjusted his features manfully.
    ‘One mustn’t mourn for bricks and mortar,’ he told himself severely. ‘But it’s sad to lose the shrine of your memories.’
    The cause of his distress was the surgical block of St Swithin’s. It was never a handsome building. It had been erected about the time Lord Lister was introducing a lot of new-fangled nonsense called aseptic surgery, when architects believed institutions catering for the sick poor should have a forbiddingly ecclesiastical appearance, to put the patients in a pliable mood of terrified gratitude. It had resembled the cross between a Thames-side warehouse and Dr Arnold’s thunderous chapel at Rugby School, but like so much of London’s richness in Victorian curiosities it was no more. The wards Sir Lancelot once strode in surgical majesty had almost unbelievably vanished. So had the operating theatre in which he had won – and sometimes lost – so many bloody battles. Even the poky ill-lit lecture room, where he had hammered the finer points of surgery into the skulls of countless students, had been unsentimentally crushed to a heap of rubble. Now there was nothing left. Only a hole in the ground, with a bulldozer nosing up piles of mud and half a dozen men in white helmets drinking tea.
    Sir Lancelot was about to revert from the harrowing sight when his eye caught something in the morning sunshine amid the brick fragments at his feet. He picked up a rusted scalpel – the old-fashioned sort with a fixed blade, the surgical equivalent of the cut-throat razor. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘I fancy that’s the one I threw at my theatre sister during a nephrotomy in 1939,’ he decided. ‘Often wondered what became of it.’
    He slipped the relic