Round The Red Lamp | Page 4

and the huge shoulders a
little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses a couple of
inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved itself over sick
beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a walnut brown, and
tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads, with the wind and
the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little distance, but as you
approach him you see that it is shot with innumerable fine wrinkles like
a last year's apple. They are hardly to be seen when he is in repose; but
when he laughs his face breaks like a starred glass, and you realise then
that though he looks old, he must be older than he looks.

How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find out,
and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the
Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must
have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed
early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is
fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He
shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses
grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was
warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his
abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought the
history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to
everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant
anticlimax.
But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was
able to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He
had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by
which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study
of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views
upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics.
Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less.
Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think
he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise
freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous
innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned.
He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer
to the stethoscope as "a new-fangled French toy." He carries one in his
hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is very
hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he uses it or
not.
He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general
idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in looking
upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of
disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the
sick room was to say, "Shut the door or the germs will be getting in."
As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of

the century. "The children in the nursery and the ancestors in the
stable," he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his eyes.
He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move
round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in the
front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been much in
vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it than any
one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when it was
new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when
instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust
more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in
the palm, tapering in the fingers, "with an eye at the end of each." I
shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the
County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible
moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr.
Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced
into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about
nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. "It's always
well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket," said he with a chuckle,
"but I suppose you youngsters are