I'd Live It Again

I HAVE recorded the following episodes in my Indian career at the repeated suggestion of many of my patients who have been kind enough to listen to an Irishmans yarns. My boyhood was devoid of incident, and I will therefore begin when I went from my public school at Sherborne to Guys Hospital in October, 18 92. It was not originally intended that I should go in for medicine, although there were several members of the profession in my family, including Barry OMeara, Napoleons doctor, the author of A voice from St. Helena or Napoleon in Exile, an indictment of the treatment of that great man by Sir Hudson Lowe, the Governor. The decision was largely due to Sir Alfred Lethbridge of the Indian Medical Service, who acted as my guardian after my fathers death in I888. Once I had begun my medical course I looked forward to the possibility of passing into the Indian Medical Service and all that a career in India held out. Of all my hospital experiences, none was more trying than the dissecting-room. It overwhelmed me with horror and dismay. Outside, thick London fog corered everything with its dreary yellow pall. Inside the long bare room, with its cold slate walls and not over-clean cement floor, the bad lighting threw weird shadows on the rows of bodies on their narrow tables. The atmosphere was beyond description. Of the mixture of smells, the only two that could be said to be pleasing were disinfectants and tobacco-smoke. They certainly were a relief. My thoughts rushed back to beautiful Devonshire lanes and sun-kissed meadows and the playing fields at Sherborne. What an awful contrast To think that at least three years of this lay ahead For such is the minimum time of those who aspire to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. One of the demonstrators of anatomy a subsequent friend of mine, who was to be twenty years a demonstrator before being promoted to the junior staff of the hospital sent me to a table and gave me an arm to dissect. I picked up my scalpel and cut human skin. What is that awful churning feeling at the pit of my stomach Steady, man You are not going to make an exhibition of yourself before all the other students. I recovered sufficiently to make a long incision down the front of an emaciated forearm. Whose forearm Whose body am I dissecting for the benefit of a coming generation I judged that it was the limb of some poor old charwoman who earned a miserable existence by scrubbing out the dingy offices of the Borough. I turned back the poor withered skin with my knife and exposed the muscles beneath, helped by words of instruction and encouragement from the kindly demonstrator looking over my shoulder who evidently sensed my physical and mental strain. By the end of the afternoon the whole front of the forearm had been exposed, and I had passed a test on the veins and first layer of muscles thereby revealed.....