Round The Red Lamp | Page 6

down to be operated upon themselves, they could not look
whiter."
"I don't think I should look as white."
"Well, I was just the same myself. But the feeling soon wears off. You
see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out he is
eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms. I'll tell you all about the case
when we get to the theatre."
The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the
infirmary--each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand. There
were pale, frightened lads, fresh from the high schools, and callous old
chronics, whose generation had passed on and left them. They swept in
an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the university gate to the hospital.
The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth
in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little--a few as if
they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed- coated and black,
round-shouldered, bespectacled, and slim, they crowded with clatter of
feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they
thickened into two lines, as the carriage of a surgeon of the staff rolled
over the cobblestones between.
"There's going to be a crowd at Archer's," whispered the senior man
with suppressed excitement. "It is grand to see him at work. I've seen
him jab all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch him. This
way, and mind the whitewash."
They passed under an archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor,
with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number.
Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling
nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of

white-counterpaned beds, and a profusion of coloured texts upon the
wall. The corridor opened upon a small hall, with a fringe of poorly
clad people seated all round upon benches. A young man, with a pair of
scissors stuck like a flower in his buttonhole and a note-book in his
hand, was passing from one to the other, whispering and writing.
"Anything good?" asked the third year's man.
"You should have been here yesterday," said the out-patient clerk,
glancing up. "We had a regular field day. A popliteal aneurism, a
Colles' fracture, a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an elephantiasis.
How's that for a single haul?"
"I'm sorry I missed it. But they'll come again, I suppose. What's up with
the old gentleman?"
A broken workman was sitting in the shadow, rocking himself slowly
to and fro, and groaning. A woman beside him was trying to console
him, patting his shoulder with a hand which was spotted over with
curious little white blisters.
"It's a fine carbuncle," said the clerk, with the air of a connoisseur who
describes his orchids to one who can appreciate them. "It's on his back
and the passage is draughty, so we must not look at it, must we, daddy?
Pemphigus," he added carelessly, pointing to the woman's disfigured
hands. "Would you care to stop and take out a metacarpal?"
"No, thank you. We are due at Archer's. Come on!" and they rejoined
the throng which was hurrying to the theatre of the famous surgeon.
The tiers of horseshoe benches rising from the floor to the ceiling were
already packed, and the novice as he entered saw vague curving lines of
faces in front of him, and heard the deep buzz of a hundred voices, and
sounds of laughter from somewhere up above him. His companion
spied an opening on the second bench, and they both squeezed into it.
"This is grand!" the senior man whispered. "You'll have a rare view of
it all."

Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating
table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong, and scrupulously clean. A
sheet of brown water-proofing covered half of it, and beneath stood a
large tin tray full of sawdust. On the further side, in front of the
window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering
instruments-- forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars. A line of
knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side. Two young men
lounged in front of this, one threading needles, the other doing
something to a brass coffee-pot-like thing which hissed out puffs of
steam.
"That's Peterson," whispered the senior, "the big, bald man in the front
row. He's the skin- grafting man, you know. And that's Anthony
Browne, who took a larynx out successfully last winter. And there's
Murphy, the pathologist, and Stoddart, the eye-man. You'll come to
know them all soon."
"Who are the two men at the table?"
"Nobody--dressers. One has charge of the instruments and the