Richard Gordon: DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

We each spent two days a week in the accident room, where I began to feel I was at last learning a little medicine by discovering how to put a bandage on without dropping it on the floor, to sew up cuts, to remove foreign bodies from eyes, and to apply a kaolin poultice. A pair of us were obliged to sleep once a week in a couple of bunks in a small room by the accident entrance, to attend the minor injuries that trickled in unendingly during the night. This system was nearly the end of Tony Benskin. In his wanderings round the sleeping hospital he had met, and taken a fancy to, one of the night nurses, and turned himself into a red-eyed wreck all day by sitting most of the night in her company.

The conditions in a ward at night are admittedly lightly aphrodisiac. The nurse sits alone at one end of the long room, which melts away on each side into shadows and is illuminated only by a single red-shaded lamp on the desk in front of her. The soft warm light makes her as desirable as a ripe peach. There is not much room at the desk, so the student and nurse sit close together., To avoid disturbing the patients they must whisper, which turns every remark into an intimacy. They are the only two awake in a sleeping world and they draw together with a tingling sense of isolation.

The nurse mixes the student a milk drink from the patients' night rations. It is surprising what can occur in such conditions over a couple of cups of Horlicks. Their knees touch under the desk; their hands brush together in a determined accident; their fingers entwine and they sweat into one another's palms until the night sister is due on her round. The student pours soft endearments over the girl like treacle on a pudding, though his technique is sometimes ruined by his being interrupted in a delicate submission to her charms by a rough voice from the nearest bed demanding 'Can I 'ave the bedpan please, nurse?'

Benskin's romance might have ended harmlessly if it had not been for a lapse on the last night of our appointment. We were on duty together, and to celebrate 'the end,of the session we persuaded the casualty nurse to do our work and spent the evening in the King George. At closing time Benskin rushed to see his night nurse, while I flopped into bed.

Just after three I was shaken awake. Automatically I reached for my trousers, thinking it was the porter demanding my attendance in the accident room: but it was Benskin. He was in a pitiful state.

'Old man!' he said urgently. 'You've got to help me! Something terrible's happened!'

I tried to concentrate on the disaster.

'What's up?' I asked sleepily.

'You know that girl up in the ward-Molly. Remember, the one I've been popping up to see?'

'Umm.'

'Well-listen, old man, don't go to sleep for God's sake! To-night I nipped up to see her as usual, and I was brimming over a bit with the old joys of spring and so forth owing to being full of beer…'

'Disgusting.'

'…and Christ Almighty, before I knew where I was I'd proposed to the bloody woman!'

I tried to clear sleep and alcohol out of my eyes, like soapsuds.

'Did she accept?' I asked, yawning.

'Accept! She said "Yes, please," as far as I remember. Don't you realize what's happened? Can't you see the gravity of the situation?'

'Perhaps she'll have forgotten by the morning,' I suggested hopefully.

'Not on your life! You know what these women are-at night nurses' breakfast it'll be a case of "Guess what, girls! Tony Benskin proposed to me at last and we're going to be married in May!" Oh God, oh God!' He clasped his head. 'It'll be all round the hospital by nine o'clock.'

'I gather you're not keen on the idea of marrying her?'

'Me! Married! Can you see it?' he exclaimed.

I nodded my head understandingly and propped myself up on an elbow.

'This needs some thought.'

'How right you are!'

'Surely there must be something you can do…can't you go back and explain it was all in fun?'

Benskin gave a contemptuous laugh.

'You go,' he said.

'I see your point. It's tricky. Let's think in silence.'

After about twenty minutes I had an idea. I criticized it to myself carefully and it seemed sound.

'I think I've got the answer,' I said, and explained it to him.

He leapt to his feet, shook me warmly by the hand, and hurried back to the ward.

The solution was a simple one. I sent Benskin round to propose to every night nurse in the hospital.

The clock on the lecture-room wall crept towards ten past four: the Professor of Pathology had overrun his time again.

It was a gloomy, overcast afternoon at the beginning of April. The lights were reflected from the brown varnish on the walls in dull yellow pools. The windows just below the ceiling were, as usual, shut tight, and the air was narcotic. The students packing the tiers of uncomfortable benches were sleepy, annoyed at being kept late, and waiting for their tea.

The Professor was unconscious of the passage of time, the atmosphere in the room, or the necessity for food and drink. He was a thin little white-haired man with large spectacles who was standing behind his desk talking enthusiastically about a little-known variety of louse. Lice were the Professor's life. For thirty years they had filled his thoughts during the day and spilled into his dreams at night. He had, at points during that time, married and raised five children, but he was only faintly aware of these occurrences, The foreground of his mind was filled by lice. He spent his time in his own small laboratory on the top floor of the hospital wholly occupied in studying their habits. He rarely came near his students. He left the teaching to his assistants and considered he had done his share by occasionally wandering round the students' laboratory, which he did with the bemused air of a man whose wife has invited a lot of people he doesn't know to a party. He insisted, however, on, giving to each class a series of lectures on his speciality. He was the greatest authority on lice in the world, and when he lectured to other pathologists in Melbourne, Chicago, Oslo, or Bombay, men would eagerly cross half a continent to hear him. But the students of his own hospital, who had only the effort of shifting themselves out of the sofas in the common room, came ungracefully and ungratefully, and found it all rather boring.

As the lecturer droned on, describing the disproportionately complicated sexual habits of an obscure species of louse, the students glanced sullenly at the clock, shuffled their feet, yawned, folded up their notebooks, put away their pens, and lolled in their seats. Some of the class started chatting to their neighbours or lit their pipes and read the evening paper as comfortably as if they were sitting in their own lodgings. From the back row came a subdued stamping of feet on the wooden floor-the students' only means of retaliation on their lecturers. But the Professor had by now forgotten the presence of his audience and if we had all marched out into the fresh air or set the lecture theatre on fire he would have noticed it only dimly.

I was sitting at the back with Tony Benskin and Sprogget. Benskin always took a place as far back as he could, for some lecturers had the unpleasant habit of asking questions of students who were dreamily inspecting the ceiling and at a distance it was possible to give the impression of overpowering concentration even if asleep. It was also convenient for making an exit unobtrusively when the lecturer became insupportably boring. Attendance at lectures was compulsory at St. Swithin's, and a board was passed round the benches for each student to record his presence by signing it. This led to everyone in the medical school rapidly becoming competent in forgery, so that the absence of a friend could easily be rectified. This unselfish practice diminished after the Dean counted the students at his own lecture and found not only that thirty-odd men were represented by ninety signatures but that some of the absentees had in their enthusiasm forgetfully signed the board in different places four times.