Doctor at Large

'Well, there's plenty more,' I said, picking up the cyst in a pair of forceps. 'I'll be finished in five minutes.'

'That isn't the bally point,' he went on crossly. 'The fact is, old chap, I particularly wanted to do that cyst. I've been looking forward to it all morning. And I might add it's pretty unethical to pinch another chap's patients, old chap.'

'It's also pretty unethical for a chap to go round the streets of London touting for custom.'

He blushed. For a few seconds he said nothing. 'I don't think I like your tone, old chap,' he muttered.

'And I don't ruddy well care if you don't.'

The patient, now alarmed that his medical advisers were about to come to blows over his body, reminded them of their obligations with a noise through the sterile towels like the neigh of a dying horse.

'I'll report you to the Prof.,' Bingham hissed, and swept out.

He revenged himself immediately by directing all the 'old chronics' to my desk. These patients were a human sludge in the machinery of St Swithin's, of which it could never rid itself. They appeared regularly with notes as large as the score of a symphony, on which the words 'Rep. Mist.' were scrawled in the writing of twenty successive house surgeons. These abbreviations entitled them to another bottle of medicine, the original purpose of which was generally forgotten and the original prescriber probably dead.

The old chronics that morning seemed unending as they shifted slowly up the benches towards me. By two o'clock there were still a dozen left; I hadn't had my lunch, and I was in a bad temper. Then I noticed a patient queue jumping.

He was a shifty-looking, elderly man dressed in a shabby black coat and striped trousers. He had sneaked down the room and sat himself on the edge of the foremost bench. He held the finger of one hand in a bloodstained handkerchief, and he still wore his black Homburg hat. I knew his type welclass="underline" we often saw head clerks and managers from surrounding offices who carried their self-importance on to the equalizing benches of the casualty-room, and we were encouraged by the Professor to stop it.

'One minute, missus,' I told a fat woman with some obscure but ancient condition of the feet. 'Now look here, daddy,' I began sharply, crossing to the interloper. 'What's the meaning of this?'

He looked up at me in alarm.

'Yes, I saw you,' I went on sternly. 'Thought you were being clever, didn't you? Sneaking up the side like that. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You won't bleed to death with that little cut, and there's plenty of people in the room more seriously injured than you. Where's your treatment card, anyway?'

'Card? I-I'm very sorry, but-what card?'

'Can't you read, daddy?' I asked in despair. 'There's a notice the size of Marble Arch inside the door. It says all patients must ask the clerk for a treatment card. So hop off and get one.'

'I'm sorry, I didn't think-'

'Run along, daddy,' I said waving him away. I returned to the lady's feet, feeling in a better temper already. Medical pomposity is an invigorating draught to a young doctor.

Within a few minutes the man had returned with his card. Now he started hovering round the back of my chair. For a while I pretended to ignore him, then I turned round and demanded angrily, 'What the devil's the matter with you now, daddy?' Why can't you go to the end of the queue like everyone else?'

'Yes, but you see, I am in rather a hurry'

'So is everybody else. So am I, if it comes to that. Now get back to the last bench.'

'Perhaps I should explain-'

'I'm not in the slightest interested. If you don't jump to it I'll get you shifted by one of the policemen.'

His mouth opened in horror. I congratulated myself-I had judged my man shrewdly. A fellow of his type would be frightened by such an indignity.

'Really, I must say, Doctor, it's a most-'

'Now stop arguing. You can't chuck your weight around as usual in here. And for God's sake, daddy, _take your blasted hat off.'_

'What on earth's going on here?'

I spun round, and found the Professor looking down at me. I had hardly spoken to him before, because he was far too occupied with the higher problems of academic surgery to worry about the poultices and fingerstalls of the casualty-room. He was a chilly, scientific man with a gravelly voice and a long nose and chin like Mr Punch. He had only once been known to laugh, the day Sir Lancelot Spratt arrived at the hospital in a brand-new plum-coloured Rolls and was rammed by an ambulance in the courtyard in front of all his students.

'This patient; sir-' I began.

'Are you in some sort of trouble, Charles?' the Professor asked.

'Yes, I am. This young man here has been behaving extremely rudely.'

The Professor looked at me as if I were one of the rats in his laboratory developing an interesting disease.

'Perhaps I had better introduce my friend, Mr Justice Hopcroft,' he said slowly. 'He unfortunately happened to cut his hand while we were lunching at my club. I have been collecting some instruments to suture it.'

I stared at him in silence. I felt the casualty-room was revolving round me at high speed.

'What did you say your name was? It's slipped my mind since making the appointment.'

'Gordon, sir,' I croaked.

'Gordon, eh?' The Professor grunted and nodded his head several times, shaking it well into his memory.

'What name?' demanded Mr Justice Hopcroft, staring hard into my face.

I repeated it.

He grunted too. 'Gordon. Yes, Gordon. I'll remember that.'

As they disappeared into minor ops. it not only seemed likely that I wouldn't retain my job, but that my first brush with the law would land me in Dartmoor for life.

2

For the next few weeks I read with equal anxiety the opinions that the Professor expressed in his case-notes on my diagnoses and those that Mr Justice Hopcroft expressed in court on the characters of his convicted criminals. Bingham now smirked every time he spoke to me, and had become intolerable. He was a bad case of the seasonal disease that struck the medical school known as 'Diplomatosis', which was characterized by delusions of grandeur and loss of memory for recent events. He had thrown away his ignominious short student's jacket, and appeared everywhere in a long white coat which he reluctantly removed only for meals; his stethoscope, which he had never carried secretly, now sprouted from his head as proudly as the horns of a rutting deer; he hurried round the hospital with jerky, urgent strides, which implied that consultations of the gravest aspect waited round every corner; he addressed patients, relatives, and junior probationers like a Victorian practitioner breaking bad news; and the responsibilities of qualification left him too preoccupied to recognize the faces of fellow-students who had been less fortunate with the examiners.

I thought Bingham's most irritating performance was in the lift. As well as the wide lifts for stretchers, St Swithin's provided for the staff a small creaking cage that usually had a worn notice on the gate saying OUT OF ORDER, which was traditionally forbidden the students. Bingham now used this lift even to descend between adjoining floors; he was particularly careful to summon it when walking along the corridor with a crowd of students, and would wait for them to arrive breathless upstairs. 'Jolly convenient, the old lift,' he said to me one morning. 'Can't understand how we used to manage without it.'

I was not left much time to brood on him, for either the drivers and pedestrians of London were becoming more careless or I was becoming less efficient: the patients in the casualty-room never thinned until supper-time, and I often had to go without my lunch as well.

'I say, old chap,' be began late one evening, as the benches were at last clearing. 'How about buzzing up to the ward and having a quiz round some cases? There's an absolutely top-hole pyelonephrosis and a retroperitoneal abscess side by side-bet you half a dollar you can't spot which is which.'