Richard Gordon: DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

'You think you could look haughty, do you?'

'One is a gentleman,' Benskin replied stiffly. 'I'm going to stay behind and have a word with this head waiter chap.'

'I'm going home to bed. We've got to appear at a lecture in five hours' time.'

'All right. See you later.'

I was dropping off to sleep when Benskin got back to Bayswater. He was jubilant.

'A push-over, old boy!' he said. 'I saw the head waiter-nasty piece of work he was, too. However, he took one look at me and said to himself "Benskin's the man! He'll raise the tone in the dining-room all right."'

'So you got the job?'

'Starting to-night. I'll just have time to nip away from the hospital, get my evening clothes out, and appear as the Jeeves of the chafing dish.'

'I suppose they know at the hotel that you have had no experience of waiting at all?'

'Well, no, not exactly. I saw no reason for putting obstacles in my own way, so I gave the impression I had dished it out at some of the larger doss-houses around Town, with summer sessions on the coast. They seem pretty hard-up for fish-flingers at the moment, as they took me at my word.'

'Well,' I said, turning over. 'Don't forget to wear a black tie.'

When I reached the flat after work that evening Benskin was in a high state of excitement.

'Must get the old soup and fish out,' he said, hauling his battered tin trunk from the top of the wardrobe.

'I pinched a bottle of ether from the theatre this afternoon to get the stains out.'

Benskin's tail suit had been bought for him by his father when he was sixteen. Since then he hard greatly increased in size in all directions. We all worked hard to straighten out the creases with John Bottle's travelling iron, while Benskin rubbed hard at the lapels to remove the grease.

'I must have been a dirty little devil at table,' he reflected.

'Some moths have been having a go at it down here,' I said, pointing to the trousers.

'That doesn't matter,' Benskin replied testily. 'I'm only the bloody waiter, anyway.'

He put the clothes on. By lowering the braces as far as he dared the trousers could be made to cover the upper part of his ankles; the braces themselves, which were red and, yellow, only remained invisible behind the lapels of the coat when he remembered not to breathe too deeply. The sleeves came as far as the mid-forearm, and the top buttons of the trousers had to be reinforced with safety-pins. But it was the shirt that presented an apparently insoluble difficulty. It was tight, and the buttonholes were worn: even the shallowest of respiration caused the studs to pop out and expose a broad strip of hairy, pink, sweaty chest.

'Quite enough to put the people off their meal,' John Bottle remarked.

We tried using bigger studs and brass paper-fasteners, but, if Benskin wished to continue to breathe, the shirt was unwearable. Even strips of sticking-plaster inside the stiff front were not strong enough to withstand the pressure of his inhalations. For half an hour we worked hard at the infuriating gap while the shirt-front became limp under our fingers.

'For God's sake!' Benskin exclaimed angrily. 'Isn't there anything we can do about it? Look at the time! If I'm not there in twenty minutes I've, had it. Surely one of you fellows has got a stiff shirt to lend me?'

'What! Your size?' Bottle asked.

'Why the devil didn't I think of buying a dickey!'

I had an idea.

'Let us apply the first principles of surgery,' I said.

'What the hell are you getting at now?'

'Supposing you have tension on a surgical, incision. What do you do? Why, make a counter-incision, of course, in a site where it doesn't matter. Take your jacket off, Tony.'

A quick rip with the scissors up the length of the shirt-back from the tail to the collar and Benskin was once again the perfect English gentleman. He left the flat in high spirits, convinced that he would make enough in the evening to keep him in drinks for a fortnight. Unhappily he was no better at serving hot soup than driving a car and was dismissed by the furious maоtre d'hфtel between the fish and the entree.

'B.I.D.,' I said. 'Brought in dead. What an epitaph!'

I was standing in the cold, bright post-mortem room on the top floor of the hospital. It was a large room with a glass roof, tiles round the walls, three heavy porcelain tables, and one side made up of a bank of numbered metal drawers like the front of a large filing cabinet. The unfortunate patients were brought by the cheery-looking fellow on his trolley to a special lift, taken to the roof, and packed away neatly in the refrigerated, drawers. Each corpse bore a label giving the name, religion, and diagnosis, but the man on the table in front of me had only the three letters on his tab. He had been picked up in the street by the police a few hours before and brought futilely to the accident room.

I pulled the heavy rubber gloves tight and began my incision with the big post-mortem knife. I never liked doing post-mortems. They made me feel sick. However, under the medical school regulations I was required to perform three of them, so I had to get on with it.

Every morning at twelve the physicians and surgeons came up to the room to see their unsuccessful cases demonstrated by the heartless pathologist. Often they had been right in life, and had the satisfaction of feeling with their fingers the lesion they had built up in their imagination from examination of the body surface, deduction, and studying the black and grey shadows on X-ray films. Occasionally they were humbled.

'So there was a tumour of the cerebellum after all!' I once heard Dr. Malcolm Maxworth exclaim, going red in the face. 'Damn it, damn it, damn it!'

Maxworth was not angry on the dead patient's behalf: it was simply that in the daily contest between his mind and the tricks of the body the body had for once won a game.

Our afternoons were spent wandering round the dusty pathology museum inspecting the grotesque specimens in the big glass jars of spirit. They had everything in the St. Swithin's museum, from two-headed babies to tattoo marks. Each specimen was neatly labelled and numbered, and a clinical history of the case was set out on a card attached to the bottle. 'How much better than a tombstone!' Grimsdyke said as he read the last dramatic illness of John O'Hara in 1927 and held the remains of his ruptured aneurism in his hand. 'I suppose everyone wants to be remembered somehow. What could be better than giving a bit of yourself to the pathologists? Nobody knows or cares where this fellow's grave is, but his memory is kept fresh in here almost daily. A whopping aneurism! I bet it caused a panic in the ward when it burst.'

Twice a week during the three-month pathology course we had classes in forensic medicine. This was a subject that fascinated me, because I was a conscientious reader of detective stories and took delight in the realization that I too now knew how to distinguish human blood from animal's, compare bullet wounds, and differentiate murder from suicide. The lecturer was a portly, genial man whose picture appeared fairly regularly in the Sunday papers inspecting the scene of all the more attractive crimes. We learnt from him the favourite ways of committing suicide, abortion, homicide, and rape: the lecture on the last subject, which was illustrated with lantern slides, was the only one I can remember when I couldn't find a seat.

After the pathology course we began a round of the special departments, spending a few weeks in each. I was sent to learn a little about eyes and then to the throat surgeons, where I learned how to look into ears, up noses, and down throats. The E.N.T. clinic was busy from early morning until long after the others had finished at night, for the London atmosphere silted up patients' sinuses and roughened their lungs. 'That stuff's really irrespirable,' said the surgeon, flinging his arm in the direction of the window. 'Thank God I live in the country.' He was a big, brusque, overworked man who had nevertheless extracted a fortune from the respiratory damage caused by London air. He was supposed to be the fastest remover of tonsils and adenoids in the country, which he did every Thursday afternoon in out-patients', passing the anaesthetized children through his hands with the efficiency of a Chicago pig-killer.