Chapter 61

THE SURGEON OF THE FLEET.

Cadwallader Cuticle, M. D., and Honorary Member of the most
distinguished Colleges of Surgeons both in Europe and America,
was our Surgeon of the Fleet. Nor was he at all blind to the
dignity of his position; to which, indeed, he was rendered
peculiarly competent, if the reputation he enjoyed was deserved.
He had the name of being the foremost Surgeon in the Navy, a
gentleman of remarkable science, and a veteran practitioner.

He was a small, withered man, nearly, perhaps quite, sixty years
of age. His chest was shallow, his shoulders bent, his pantaloons
hung round skeleton legs, and his face was singularly attenuated.
In truth, the corporeal vitality of this man seemed, in a good
degree, to have died out of him. He walked abroad, a curious
patch-work of life and death, with a wig, one glass eye, and a
set of false teeth, while his voice was husky and thick; but his
mind seemed undebilitated as in youth; it shone out of his
remaining eye with basilisk brilliancy.

Like most old physicians and surgeons who have seen much service,
and have been promoted to high professional place for their
scientific attainments, this Cuticle was an enthusiast in his
calling. In private, he had once been heard to say, confidentially,
that he would rather cut off a man's arm than dismember the wing of
the most delicate pheasant. In particular, the department of Morbid
Anatomy was his peculiar love; and in his state-room below he had a
most unsightly collection of Parisian casts, in plaster and wax,
representing all imaginable malformations of the human members, both
organic and induced by disease. Chief among these was a cast, often
to be met with in the Anatomical Museums of Europe, and no doubt an
unexaggerated copy of a genuine original; it was the head of an
elderly woman, with an aspect singularly gentle and meek, but at the
same time wonderfully expressive of a gnawing sorrow, never to be
relieved. You would almost have thought it the face of some abbess,
for some unspeakable crime voluntarily sequestered from human
society, and leading a life of agonised penitence without hope; so
marvellously sad and tearfully pitiable was this head. But when you
first beheld it, no such emotions ever crossed your mind. All your
eyes and all your horrified soul were fast fascinated and frozen by
the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward
growing out from the forehead, and partly shadowing the face; but as
you gazed, the freezing fascination of its horribleness gradually
waned, and then your whole heart burst with sorrow, as you
contemplated those aged features, ashy pale and wan. The horn seemed
the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and committed