Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Any man will beggar himself for a woman, with the exquisite cheerfulness he reserves for observing somebody else beggar his neighbour.' Shaw had of course no need to wind up the watch of his wit, but the chimes sometimes had little relevance to the hour.

I noticed Fleming, perched on the table looking bored. He was a short, stocky man, with a large head, a pink complexion, pale blue eyes, a small chin and a straight mouth which turned down at each end like Sir Walter Scott's. His was that unmercurial Lowland face, to be encountered as readily in the pubs of Glasgow as the mission huts of China or the surgeries of Canada. He was clean shaven, though at the Boulogne Casino he was a Lieutenant with a neat triangular black moustache. He seldom smiled. He was often silent.

At fifty-three, his thick black hair with a quiff had grown grey. He wore his usual dark suit, with semi-stiff collar and spotted bow tie, and it was the brief period of the year which he found too warm for his grey knitted pullover. He had an enormous wristwatch. He was nearly always smoking a cigarette. I wondered if his thoughts were in his lab, or the Chelsea Arts Club where he stopped on his way home, or even further in the hills of Argyll.

Sir Almroth took a teacup from the fixedly smiling Freeman. He continued severely, 'You cannot divert attention from good arguments by bad ones, as you repeatedly succeed in doing on the stage.'

'The female physiological constitution is a matter of fashion, like all medical theories. Today's philosophy is tomorrow's absurdity, and what was rank foolishness last year is everybody's wisdom the next.'

It was the traditional fireworks display in the Inoculation Department, but the squibs were growing damp. Shaw did not die until he broke his hip lopping trees in 1950, but that afternoon in St Mary's he had everything behind him, only Geneva and _In Good King Charles's Golden Days_ to come. It was thirty years since Wright had struck from his flinty mind the spark of _The Doctor's Dilemma._ The play was prompted by a gratified observation from Freeman that the Department had more work than it could handle, and Wright's reply to Shaw's inevitable question that the human life for the doctor to save under such pressure of strained resources was the life most worth saving. Sir Almroth had walked out of the first night at the Royal Court Theatre in 1906, not because he objected to his depiction on the boards as Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the stimulator of the phagocytes, but because in his opinion Shaw killed off the wrong patient.

Behind Sir Almroth that afternoon was his brazen declaration, 'The physician of the future will be an immunizer.' Ahead lay the bitter confession at the age of eighty to the Royal Society of Medicine, of the 'Need for abandoning much in immunology regarded as assured.' He left a heap of discredited medical theories and a book on logic, which consumed his life in the writing and again which nobody wanted to read.

As I left, Fleming handed me silently a copy of the _British Journal of Experimental Pathology,_ which he inscribed on the cover _For J Elgar,_ and signed. Neither he nor anyone else had said anything about a job.

'Jim-!'

I was just quitting the hospital under the bridge leading to the 'House of Lords'. I spun round.

'David!'

'What the hell are you doing back here, boy?'

'Taking tea with Sir Almroth Wright.'

'What? With the Holy Ghost himself? My word, you're doing well.'

'I'm on the dole.'

'Go on! Pull the other one.'

'What are you doing here?'

'I'm doing my clinical. I'm one of the students. Didn't I tell you I was going to Mary's, when I went down from Cambridge? I've been here a year.'

'Did you get that First in your Part Two?'

David Mellors modestly nodded away this achievement. 'What have you been up to? More work on the staining of bacteria?'

'I've had a year in Germany.'

'You never let on you were going. Which university?'

'I worked in a brewery.'

'Oh, lovely! How do I get a job like that?' He was small, dark, wiry, lively, as Welsh as a leek. He looked at his wristwatch. 'Listen, boy. I've got a five o'clock lecture. The Fountains across the road opens at six. I'll meet you in the public bar. Can you waste an hour?'

An hour seemed of little consequence when I had wasted the past six months. I idled the time away by going to Paddington Station and watching the trains.

David Mellors and I had been friendly at Trinity, thrown together by both of us being 'scholarship boys'. Thackeray's Pendennis was still up at Cambridge then. Most of the undergraduates at Trinity were from the great public schools, many were there simply to amuse themselves. They were swells who never spared their polished contempt for students with the wrong sort of clothes or wrong sort of accent or who worked too hard or had too many brains. I had spent vacations cycling with David round the Welsh valleys, where his father kept a chemist's shop and was immeasurably better off than mine. We lost touch since I quit Cambridge for Wuppertal during the Christmas vacation of 1932. The young live too immediately to recognize friendship as a precious plant worth careful cultivation.

I arrived at the Fountains Abbey as the landlord was shooting back the bolts. I sat at a small round table with half a pint of mild ale, and there being no sign of David pulled out the journal which Fleming had pressed on me. It was Issue No 10, dated June 1929, an abstruse publication which appeared every two months and which I had never before opened.

Inside was a list of its editors. I recognized only two names. J C Drummond was a biochemist like myself, a sprightly, well-liked gourmet, professor at University College in Bloomsbury. W H Florey I remembered as an Australian at Cambridge, lecturer in pathology and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, next door to Trinity. During my final year, Dr Florey had left to become Professor at Sheffield, and every high table chorused amazed tut-tuts.

The index of papers seemed pretty uninteresting. _Tetanus…Myxomatosis of Rabbits_…The last of all had the title, _On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium._ I had never seen Fleming's paper on the fruits of my mistake. I found it covered thirteen pages, bolstered with tables and photographs.

It told me little that I had not already heard from Sir Edward Tiplady. I noticed that twenty-five unknown St Mary's nurses, who are claimed to be the prettiest in London, had involuntarily helped the research when laid up with influenza. Their throat swabs had been cultivated on agar jelly with and without penicillin added. On the ordinary jelly, the streptococcus and pneumonococcus germs which flourish even in healthy throats grew profusely. With the penicillin, no nurse's germs grew at all. There was a photograph of the original Petri dish, which Fleming had shown Sir Edward. It made me recall something which Fleming said at the time-that he was studying the pigment which coloured colonies of staphylococcus germs, which showed best if the germs were grown at room temperature instead of inside an incubator. So that particular Petri dish happened to have been left open on the laboratory bench for the penicillium mould to drop on it. As Sir Edward had mentioned, the mould juice had been squeezed from a skein of chances.

Fleming ended by mentioning that its lack of irritant or poisonous effect might recommend penicillin as a surgical dressing, or for an injection round an infection. There was still no sign of David Mellors. I rolled up the journal and stuck it back in my pocket, carefully retaining half an inch in the bottom of my glass to defy the landlord.

The pub was filling as David burst in, pile of notebooks under his arm, stethoscope coiling from the jacket of his unkempt blue suit. 'I had a practical to finish. What'll you have?'