Doctor in the House Read Online Free PDF Page B

admitted. ‘Perhaps we ought to raise some help.’
    There were a pair of demonstrators in the dissecting room – young doctors passing grey years in the anatomy department for small wages in the hope of being appointed to the surgical staff of St Swithin’s in middle age. They flitted from one group of students to another like bees in a herbaceous border, pollinating each pair with knowledge. Both of them were far away from our table.
    At that moment I caught sight of Grimsdyke, in a shining starched coat, strolling between the dissectors like an Englishman in a Suez bazaar. He waved languidly to me.
    ‘How are you progressing?’ he asked, crossing to our table. ‘Good God, is that as far as you’ve got?’
    ‘It’s very difficult,’ I explained. ‘You see, we don’t quite know how to start. Could you give us a bit of a hand?’
    ‘But certainly, my dear old boy,’ Grimsdyke said, picking up a scalpel. ‘I have now dissected four legs and consider I have something of a flair for the knife. This is the gluteus maximus muscle.’
    Grimsdyke slit his way rapidly through the muscles and in half an hour did our work for the week.
     
    The routine of lectures and dissection passed the time agreeably. After a few weeks I began to distinguish more sharply the personalities of my fellow students, as an eye gradually sees the objects in a darkened room. My dissecting partner, Tony Benskin, was a cheery young man whose mental horizon was bounded by rugby football and beer drinking and clouded over only with a chronic scarcity of cash. Dissecting the fellow to our leg was the ginger-haired youth I had noticed at the Dean’s lecture reading Darwin. He turned out to be a quiet and disturbingly brilliant Welshman called Evans, who started the course under the impetus of a senior scholarship. Evans dissected away conscientiously and efficiently from the start – which was fortunate, as his own companion rarely put in an appearance in the anatomy room at all. He was a handsome fellow named John Bottle, whose interests in life were ballroom dancing and the dogs. He spent most of his afternoons in the palais and his evenings at Harringay or the White City. The middle-aged man with the notebook I soon discovered to be an ex-bank clerk called Sprogget, who was left a little money after twenty years’ looking at a ledger and immediately fulfilled an almost forgotten ambition of taking up medicine. Sprogget was unfortunate in being partnered by the most objectionable student in the class – a man named Harris, whom Grimsdyke named immediately the Keen Student. Harris knew everything. His greased black hair, parted precisely in the middle, and his thick-rimmed spectacles popped frequently between a pair of dissectors.
    ‘You know, old man,’ he would volunteer, ‘you’re not doing that bit according to the book. You ought to have exposed the nerve before you cut away the tendons. Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, but I thought it might save you a bit of trouble with the Prof later. I say, you’ve made a mess of the brachial artery, haven’t you?’
    He was incorrigible. He sat at the front of the lectures and asked grave questions to which he already knew the answers. He ate a lunch of sandwiches in the locker room of the anatomy department, reading a text-book; and his conversation was limited strictly to anatomy. He regarded the barracking to which he was inevitably subjected as another instance of persecution of the intellectuals.
    Grimsdyke was a useful acquaintance, for his four years’ start put him on familiar terms with the senior students. One afternoon shortly after my arrival he hailed me as I was walking out of the medical school doorway.
    ‘I say, old lad,’ he called. ‘Come and meet Mike Kelly. He’s secretary of the rugger club.’
    There was a broad young man with a red face standing beside him. He wore an old tweed jacket with leather on the elbows and a brilliant yellow pullover.
    ‘How do you