Doctor in the House Read Online Free PDF Page A

administered an enema of Guinness’ stout.
    I had lunch alone at the ABC and went down to a medical bookshop in Bloomsbury to buy some text-books. I had to get a copy of Gray’s Anatomy , the medical student’s bible, as unquestionable authority on anatomy as Hansard on a parliamentary debate. When I saw the book my heart sank under its weight. I flicked over the two thousand foolscap pages of detailed anatomical description split up by beautiful bold drawings of yellow nerves, bright red arteries, and blue veins twining their way between dissected brown muscles that opened like the petals of an unfolding flower. I wondered how anyone could ever come to learn all the tiny facts packed between its covers as thickly as the grains in a sack of wheat. I also bought a set of volumes giving directions for dissection of the body, a thick tome on physiology full of graphs and pictures of vivisected rabbits, and a book of Sir William Osler’s addresses to medical students.
    ‘Is there anything else, sir?’ the assistant asked politely.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A skeleton. Do you happen to have a skeleton?’
    ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re out of skeletons at the moment. The demand on them is particularly heavy at this time of the year.’
    I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting a skeleton for use in the evenings with the anatomical text-books. I found one in a shop off Wigmore Street and took it back to my digs. Most landladies had become accustomed to a skull to be dusted on the mantelpiece and a jumble of dried bones in the corner, but students moving into lodgings that had previously sheltered such inoffensive young men as law or divinity pupils were sometimes turned out on the grounds that their equipment precipitated in the good lady a daily attack of the creeps.
     
    For the first two years of their course medical students are not allowed within striking distance of a living patient. They learn the fundamentals of their art harmlessly on dead ones. The morning after the Dean’s lecture the new class was ordered to gather in the anatomical dissecting room to begin the term’s work.
    The dissecting room was a high, narrow apartment on the ground floor of the medical school that exhaled a strong smell of phenol and formaldehyde. A row of tall frosted glass windows filled one wall, and the fluorescent lights that hung in strips from the ceiling gave the students themselves a dead, cyanotic look. The wall opposite the windows supported a length of blackboard covered with drawings of anatomical details in coloured chalks. In one corner was a stand of pickled specimens, like the bottles on a grocer’s shelves, and in the other a pair of assembled skeletons grinned at each other, suspended from gallows like the minatory remains of highwaymen. Down the room were a dozen high, narrow, glass-topped tables in two rows. And on the tables, in different stages of separation, were six or seven dissected men and women.
    I looked at the bodies for the first time curiously. They were more like mummies than recently dead humans. All were the corpses of old people, and the preserving process to which they had been subjected had wrinkled them beyond that of ageing. Four untouched subjects lay naked and ready for the new class, but at the other tables the senior students were already at work. Some of the groups had advanced so far that the part they were dissecting was unidentifiable to an unknowing onlooker like myself; and here and there a withered, contracted hand stuck out in silent supplication from a tight group of busy dissectors.
    We stood nervously just inside the door waiting for instructions from the Professor of Anatomy. Each of us wore a newly starched white coat and carried a little canvas roll containing a pair of forceps, a freshly sharpened scalpel, and a small wire probe stuck into a pen-handle. The others, to impress their superiority on the newcomers, disregarded us completely.
    The Professor had the reputation of an