The Surgeon Talks - Page 2

was
told that inevitable death lay before him, a death
accompanied by more refined and lingering tortures
than if he were bound upon a Red Indian stake. He
sat in the middle of the blue cigarette cloud with
his eyes cast down, and the slightest little
tightening of his lips. Then he rose with a motion
of his arms, as one who throws off old thoughts and
enters upon a new course.

"'Better put this thing straight at once,' said
he. 'I must make some fresh arrangements. May I use
your paper and envelopes?'

"He settled himself at my desk and he wrote half
a dozen letters. It is not a breach of confidence to
say that they were not addressed to his professional
brothers. Walker was a single man, which means that
he was not restricted to a single woman. When he had
finished, he walked out of that little room of mine,
leaving every hope and ambition of his life behind
him. And he might have had another year of
ignorance and peace if it had not been for the chance
illustration in his lecture.

"It took five years to kill him, and he stood it
well. If he had ever been a little irregular he
atoned for it in that long martyrdom. He kept an
admirable record of his own symptoms, and worked out
the eye changes more fully than has ever been done.
When the ptosis got very bad he would hold his eyelid
up with one hand while he wrote. Then, when he could
not co-ordinate his muscles to write, he dictated to
his nurse. So died, in the odour of science, James
Walker, aet. 45.

"Poor old Walker was very fond of experimental
surgery, and he broke ground in several directions.
Between ourselves, there may have been some more
ground-breaking afterwards, but he did his best for
his cases. You know M'Namara, don't you? He always
wears his hair long. He lets it be understood that
it comes from his artistic strain, but it is really
to conceal the loss of one of his ears. Walker cut
the other one off, but you must not tell Mac I said
so.

"It was like this. Walker had a fad about the
portio dura--the motor to the face, you know--and he
thought paralysis of it came from a disturbance of
the blood supply. Something else which
counterbalanced that disturbance might, he
thought, set it right again. We had a very obstinate
case of Bell's paralysis in the wards, and had tried
it with every conceivable thing, blistering, tonics,
nerve-stretching, galvanism, needles, but all without
result. Walker got it into his head that removal of
the ear would increase the blood supply to the part,
and he very soon gained the consent of the patient to
the operation.

"Well, we did it at night. Walker, of course,
felt that it was something of