Fenn George Manville Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon
Chapter One. My Patients
Wealthy patients as a rule do not possess that faith in their doctor. They always seem to expect that a disease which has been coming on, perhaps, for months, can be cured right off in a few hours by a touch of the doctors hand. If this result does not follow, and I may tell you at once it never does unless it be in a case of toothache, and a tooth is drawn the patient is peevish and fretful, the doctor is looked upon as unskilful, and, money being no object, the chances are that before the doctor or surgeon has had a chance, another practitioner is called in.
On the other hand, a quiet stalwart working man comes to you with a childlike faith and simplicity; he is at one with you; and he helps his cure by his simple profound belief in your skill.
A great deal of working-class doctoring and surgery has fallen to my lot, for fate threw me into a mixed practice. Sooner than wait at home idle for patients who might never come, I have made a point of taking any mans practice pro tem , while the owner was ill, or away upon a holiday, and so improved my own knowledge better than I should have done by reading ever so hard. The consequence is that I have been a good deal about the country, and amongst a great variety of people, and the result of my experience is that your genuine working man, if he has been unspoiled by publicans, and those sinners, the demagogues, who are always putting false notions into his head, is a thoroughly sterling individual. That is the rule. I need not quote the exceptions, for there are black sheep enough among them, even as there are among other classes. Take him all in all, the British workman is a being of whom we may well be proud, and the better he is treated the brighter the colours in which he will come out.
Of course he has his weak points; we all have them, and very unpleasant creatures we should be without. A man all strong points is the kind of being to avoid. Have nothing to do with him. Depend upon it the finest the most human of Gods creatures, are those who have their share of imperfections mingled with the good that is in every one more or less.
They are men, these workers, who need the surgeon more than ordinary people, for too often their lives are the lives of soldiers fighting in the battle of life; and many are the wounded and slain.
I used at one time from no love of the morbid, please bear in mind, but from genuine desire to study my profession to think that I should like to go out as an army surgeon, and be with a regiment through some terrible war. For it seemed to me that nothing could do more towards making a professional man prompt and full of resources than being called upon to help his suffering fellow-creatures shot down, cut down, trampled beneath horses feet, blown up, bayoneted, hurt in one of the thousand ways incidental to warfare, besides suffering from the many diseases that follow in an armys train. But I very soon learned that there was no need for any such adventure, for I could find ample demands on such poor skill as I possessed by devoting myself to the great army of toilers fighting in our midst. Talk of demands upon a mans energy and skill; calls upon his nerve; needs for promptness and presence of mind! There are plenty such in our every-day life; for, shocking as it may sound, the tale of killed and wounded every week in busy England is terribly heavy. Go to some manufacturing town where steam hisses and pants, and there is the throb and whirr of machinery from morn till night yes, and onward still from night to morn where the furnaces are never allowed to slacken go there and visit the infirmary, and you will find plenty of wounded in the course of the year. You have the same result, too, in the agricultural districts, where, peaceful as is the labourers pursuit, he cannot avoid mishaps with horses, waggons, threshing-machines, even with his simple working tools. In busy London itself the immense variety of calls upon the surgeons skill leaves him little to desire in the way of experience.
Many years of sheer toil have caused a kind of friendship to grow up between me and the working man. In fact I consider
And you feel better? she says, laying her hand on mine.
Better! I says, taking a long draught of the soft sweet-scented air, and filling my chest better, old girl! I feel as if I was growing backwards into a boy.
And you fifty last week! she says.
Yes, I says, smiling, and you forty-seven next week. And then we sat thinking for a bit.
Polly, I says at last, as I sat there drinking in that soft breeze, and feeling it give me strength, its worth being ill only to feel as I do now.
For you see Id been very bad, else I dare say Im not the man to go hanging about churchyards and watching funerals: Im a stoker, and my work lies in steamers trading to the East. Id come home from my last voyage bad with fever, caught out in one of those nasty hot bad-smelling ports been carried home to die, as my mates thought; and it was being like this, and getting better, that had set me thinking so seriously, and made me so quiet; not that I was ever a noisy sort of man, as any one who knows me will say. And now, after getting better, the doctor had said I must go into the country to get strength; so as there was no more voyaging till I was strong, there was nothing for it but to leave the youngsters under the care of the eldest girl and a neighbour, and come and take lodgings out in this quiet Surrey village.