St. Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student. Edward Berdoe
muscles; infectious diseases, their symptoms and treatment; everything medical and surgical that any examiner had been ever known to ask a question about was by this ingenious fellow reduced to a simple formula of catch words, constituting an original system of artificial memory. Everybody who wanted a good tip for anatomical or other difficulties went to Lennard, and came away with a cabalistic arrangement of ludicrous words, that to most men were more difficult to remember than the facts they were intended to represent. To himself, however, they must have been amazingly useful, as he certainly did pass his exams, and it is no less certain that he seldom did any work, and never really understood what he did manage to get through. He was full of good nature, and always ready to “help any lame dog over a stile,” as he called it; so the needy men went to him when they wanted to borrow; and the helpless idiots who could not learn in the ordinary way, but resorted to royal roads and short cuts, got his tips, and made so mixed and bungling a use of them, that this patent method frequently completed the downfall of those who essayed to bend Ulysses’ bow.
There was Tim Finnigan, “a broth of a bhoy,” from the wilds of Galway, all fun and frolic, but good at learning, and witty as ever trod a bog or broke a head. It was he who led the raid on the Statuary Exhibition near Queen’s College one Saturday night, and carried the great nude gods and goddesses into the adjoining churchyard; so that when the good folk went to early mass, they were confronted by Venuses and Apollos, impudently airing themselves under the trees by the pathway, “mit nodings on.” The maiden lady, whose parlour window overlooked the churchyard, was horrified when she came down to breakfast that Sunday morning, to see a dreadful great plaster man unblushingly staring at her in the undraped similitude of a Greek athlete. The church was served by an order of French religious, and the agony of the poor fathers at the shocking display, rivalling the groves of Blarney, outside their monastic church was painful to behold. Tim Finnigan was present when they discovered the exhibition on their premises, and he declared he never afterwards could believe that a Frenchman had any sense of humour. Poor Tim was discovered to have been the hero of this freak, and that was why he left Queen’s College and turned up at St. Bernard’s. The maiden lady who had caught the vision of the athlete thought expulsion a punishment all too light for him.
There was “Darkey” Dobbs; he was not christened Darkey, his swarthy complexion was the cause of his nickname. He had great mechanical ability, which he brought to bear on his practical jokes. His rapid knack of getting brass plates off doors and railings, his skill at wrenching knockers and bell-handles without alarming the owners, made him an indispensable companion of a night’s fun. It was Darkey who invented the celebrated coffee-stall joke. Four fellows hired a “growler” early one winter’s morning in the main road by the hospital. Three of them got out of the cab and called for coffee, and treated cabby; and while the attention of the stall-keeper was arrested in serving his new customers, the fourth occupant of the vehicle quietly got out, and, unperceived by anybody, tied a long cord to one of the posts of the stall and connected it with the shafts. Cabby remounted, his fares discharged him and decamped, and he drove off dragging the stall behind the vehicle, upsetting all the cups and platters, and wrecking the whole concern. It was said that the stall-keeper’s language was “not of a kind to adorn any Sunday-school book;” when the rope was cut, and the damage calculated, he found to his great grief that a pound would not cover it. It was a good deal for the poor fellow to lose, but the amusement to the perpetrators of the joke was immense, and “the greatest good of the greatest number” was one of the articles of a creed they firmly held.
Then there was “Camel” Campbell, called “Camel” on account of his humpy shoulders, though he was christened Horace. He was the hero of a droll adventure in Great Titchfield Street. Passing through that thoroughfare early one Sunday morning with four or five stalwart fellows of the same kidney, they found a groggy old gentleman who could not gain admittance to his house because his wife had bolted the door, and his latch-key did not avail him. What did Camel and his mates do but in a moment pick him up, and, swinging him backwards and forwards two or three times to get a good impetus, shoot him feet foremost like a bolt from a catapult, smash through the parlour window, where he landed on the table amidst the crash of broken glass, and the disintegrated bust of Psyche that erstwhile beamed upon the street from under a handsome shade. Not one of them was caught; they dispersed by different routes, and got clear away before the leaden feet of the policeman had brought him on the scene.
It must not for a moment be supposed that all, or even the majority, of the men were as much devoted to boisterous amusements as those we have been describing. The quiet, hard workers found means to keep themselves aloof from such revelling, though even they, under the charm of the influence the leading spirits exercised over the generous, light-hearted youths who compose the majority of medical students, sometimes abandoned themselves to the spirit of devilry which often broke loose when the day’s work was over.
Very hard workers, who went in for the greater prizes and scholarships, were obliged to live at a distance from the place, that they might be under the less temptation to this sort of thing.
The assembled guests were in high spirits to-night. Though they had done very little of the work they were supposed to have got through, and had attended scarcely half of the lectures they ought to have heard, they had succeeded in getting their papers signed; and, with but two exceptions, they had as much credit given them on their schedules for honest work as if they had been the most assiduous and conscientious of students. So they sang their songs and retold their stories, drank their beer, smoked their tobacco, played nap, and laughed and talked as only youngsters full of life and spirits can who lead the Bohemian life of a medico.
Lennard was inclined to be sentimental and romantic. “What adventures,” said he, “we should hear if the corpses in that dissecting-room over yonder could tell their histories! Unclaimed all of them! Think what that means. How low one must sink when nobody comes forward to ask the parish to bury you at its own expense! Let me conjure up a history for you of the seven subjects on the tables where we have been at work to-day. I will begin at my own, where I am ‘doing my leg.’”
“Ah! I am glad you said ‘doing.’ I should have demurred to ‘dissecting,’ had you said that,” threw in Murphy.
Disregarding the interruption, Lennard went on: “This old man – not so very old, about sixty I should say – has good features and toil-worn hands; was, let us say, an unfrocked parson: fell into bad ways, family disowned him; left his old associates, or they left him; gradually sank lower and lower; sold little things in the street; lived at threepenny lodging-houses; got ill; taken into the parish infirmary; died, and came here. Think of all he must have gone through! How he would remember his happy youth at school, at Oxford, his ordination, his good aspirations, the society he mixed in, and the remorse that embittered his life. This sort of thing is common enough. That woman on the next table, with the spinal fracture, a tight-rope dancer in her early days; used to delight the habitués of Old Vauxhall; one night fell and broke her back. Folk soon got tired of helping her. Her husband made her happy, and was good to her; till, in old age, he died, and she was left bedridden and without means. Even the church folk got tired of the case. She went into the workhouse, died, and so came here. All this as likely as not. Think of those long years of suffering! From the last dazzling lights and gaiety of Vauxhall, to the gradually beworsening room where she lay a cripple for so many years, while her husband did his best to cheer her, and make her as easy as he could. Behind her is a coloured woman not more than forty. How came she here? A stranger from beyond the seas, knowing nothing of our language, brought here by friends who held out hopes of gain and pleasure, and then left her sick and dying in St. George’s Workhouse, down by the London Docks.”
“Oh! hang it all, Lennard!” cried Mahoney; “you are preaching like a teetotal orator. Confound it, we can’t stand the whole seven of ’em. That’s enough! Why, what could the old parson want more than to give a medical school like ours his ‘body of divinity’? He has preached a better sermon in the hands of Professor Sturge than he ever did at church, and his illustrations are much more telling, I dare say; and he makes no reservations now. I can imagine nothing more honourable than to devote one’s body to a dissecting-room out of mere gratitude to a science that has helped us in life. But this is a dismal strain we are in. Give us your song, Williams; dear old Albert Smith’s ‘Student’s Alphabet.’”
Williams