A Medical Document

Medical men are, as a class, very much too busy
to take stock of singular situations or dramatic
events. Thus it happens that the ablest chronicler
of their experiences in our literature was a lawyer.
A life spent in watching over death-beds--or over
birth-beds which are infinitely more trying--takes
something from a man's sense of proportion, as
constant strong waters might corrupt his palate. The
overstimulated nerve ceases to respond. Ask the
surgeon for his best experiences and he may reply
that he has seen little that is remarkable, or break
away into the technical. But catch him some night
when the fire has spurted up and his pipe is reeking,
with a few of his brother practitioners for company
and an artful question or allusion to set him going.
Then you will get some raw, green facts new plucked
from the tree of life.

It is after one of the quarterly dinners of the
Midland Branch of the British Medical Association.
Twenty coffee cups, a dozer liqueur
glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which
swirls slowly along the high, gilded ceiling gives a
hint of a successful gathering. But the members have
shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy,
bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing
top hats is gone from the hotel corridor. Round the
fire in the sitting-room three medicos are still
lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a
fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits
back at the table. Under cover of an open journal he
is writing furiously with a stylographic pen, asking
a question in an innocent voice from time to time and
so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a
tendency to wane.

The three men are all of that staid middle age
which begins early and lasts late in the profession.
They are none of them famous, yet each is of good
repute, and a fair type of his particular branch.
The portly man with the authoritative manner and the
white, vitriol splash upon his cheek is Charley
Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum, and author of
the brilliant monograph--Obscure Nervous Lesions in
the Unmarried. He always wears his collar high like
that, since the half-successful attempt of a student
of Revelations to cut his throat with a splinter of
glass. The second, with the ruddy face and the merry
brown eyes, is a general practitioner, a man of
vast experience, who, with his three assistants
and his five horses, takes twenty-five hundred a year
in half-crown visits and shilling consultations out
of the poorest quarter of a great city. That cheery
face of Theodore Foster is seen at the side of a
hundred sick-beds a day, and if he has one-third more
names on his visiting list than in