Doctor in Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

for less than two weeks. And I’ve made more progress.”
    “Look here, Gordon! I’m not up to all these fancy tricks. I’m no…blasted Casanova. I’m an ordinary simple chap, and I love her. If you try to…to…” But words were beyond him. He crashed one fist into another, then silently pushed his way through the screens and disappeared.
    “I’m not having the enema,” I called after him. “I’ll complain to Pennyworth tomorrow.”
    When Dr Pennyworth reached my bedside on his ward-round the following afternoon Hinxman seemed strangely composed. I supposed that was because he had already countermanded the enema, and thought that I had nothing to complain about.
    “How are you getting on?” whispered Dr Pennyworth, peering at me through his pince-nez.
    “He’s sleeping very badly,” cut in Hinxman, before I could say anything. “We’ve tried him on all the usual narcotics of course, sir. But he seems to be one of these resistant cases.”
    “Very interesting.”
    “So I thought, sir, as he’s desperate, you could prescribe him an effective dosage.”
    “Sleep,” murmured Dr Pennyworth as I tried to protest, “is the physician’s greatest friend. ‘Oh Sleep! It is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole?’ Eh?” He then prescribed with his own pen a dose of barbiturate that would have kept a woodful of owls quiet.
    “You’ll have to swallow them all,” said Sister, handing me the scarlet capsules that evening. “It’s Doctor Pennyworth’s own orders, you know.”
    I slept twelve hours a night solidly for a week, when to the relief of both Hinxman and myself Dr Pennyworth officially discharged me for convalescence at home.

5
    My father, Dr Gregory Gordon, MB, BChir, had a general practice in a popular South Coast town, where we had lived as long as I could remember in an over-large Edwardian villa looking across the roofs of innumerable boarding-houses towards the sea. He too was a St Swithin’s man, having qualified there about thirty years before I did. Since then he had been occupied in building a prosperous practice, and was now beginning to suffer success. The hourly ringing of doorbell and telephone were as natural a part of my childhood as the chiming of the grandfather clock below the stairs; but in those days my father still had time to read textbooks and occasionally take me to the County ground, while now that his patients included not only the Mayor but most of the Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce as well, he had barely a moment to sit down with the Lancet or glance at the cricket scores. Even as I arrived home the next afternoon I met him dashing from the front door with his bag.
    “Hello, Richard my boy! Good to see you. Better?”
    “Very much better, thanks.”
    “What was it you had? Catarrhal jaundice?”
    “Yes, except that nowadays they call it infective hepatitis.”
    “You’re a bit on the thin side. Sorry I couldn’t get up with your mother to see you. They looked after you all right in St Swithin’s, I hope? Who was your doctor?”
    “Old Pennyworth.”
    “Good Lord, is he still going? I thought he’d be dead long ago. How are you feeling in yourself?”
    “A bit tottery still.”
    “You’ll soon get over it. As a matter of fact, I was rather hoping you could help me out with a few surgeries a little later on. Must rush off now – I’ve got a perforation miles away on the other side of the housing estate. Ask Miss Jamieson to make you some tea.”
    “Isn’t mother in?”
    “Mother? I can’t remember whether it’s her afternoon to help with the Young Conservatives or the Old Contemptibles.” As my mother honoured all the obligations of a successful doctor’s wife, she rarely seemed to meet my father at all between his being called away from breakfast to see a suspected appendix to his coming in at midnight from seeing a suspected drunk-in-charge. “By the way, if any phone calls come in be a good lad and see what you can make of the