Behind the Times - Page 2

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