Richard Gordon: DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

We stood nervously just inside the door waiting for instructions from the Professor of Anatomy. Each of us wore a newly starched white coat and carried a little canvas roll containing a pair of forceps, a freshly sharpened scalpel, and a small wire probe stuck into a pen-handle. The others, to impress their superiority on the newcomers, disregarded us completely.

The Professor had the reputation of an academic Captain Bligh. He was one of the country's most learned anatomists, and his views on the evolution of the hyoid bone in the throat were quoted to medical students in dissecting rooms from San Francisco to Sydney. His learned distinction was unappreciated by his students, however, all of whom were terrified of him.

He had several little unnerving peculiarities. For some reason the sight of a student walking into the medical school with his hands in his pockets enraged him. His private room was next to the main entrance, so it was convenient for him to shoot out and seize by the shoulders any man he saw through the window sauntering into the building in this way. He would shake him and abuse him thoroughly for some minutes before stepping back into his room to watch for the next one. This habit was thought unpleasant by the students, but nothing could be done about it because the Professor, who controlled the examinations, held the power of justice at all levels in the anatomy school.

The Professor appeared suddenly in the dissecting room through his private entrance. The hum of conversation at the tables immediately ceased and was replaced by serious, silent, activity.

He stood for some moments looking at his new class narrowly. The sight apparently did not please him. He grunted, and drawing a sheet of paper from the pocket of his white coat called a roll of our names in a voice rough with disgust. He was a tall thin man, shaped like a bullet. His bald head rose to a pointed crown and his body sloped outwards gently to his tiny feet far below. He wore a mangy ginger beard.

He put the list of names back in his pocket.

'Now listen to me, you fellows,' he began sternly. 'You've got to work in this department, d'you understand? I'm not going to put up with any slacking for a moment. Anatomy's tough-you can't learn it unless you put your backs into it. Any laziness here, and…' He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. 'Out! See?'

We nodded nervously, like a squad of recruits listening to their first drill sergeant.

'And I don't want to see any of you men slopping round with your hands in your pockets. It's all right for errand boys and pimps, but you're supposed to be medical students. The attitude is not only unanatomical but gives you osteoarthritis of the shoulder girdle in your middle age. No wonder you all grow up into a hunchbacked crowd of deformities! I know I'm ugly, but I can stand up straight, which is more than some of you people. Do you follow me?'

We assented briskly.

'Right. Well, get on with some work. The list of parts for dissection is up on the board at the end there.'

With a final glare he disappeared through his door.

I had been allotted a leg for my first term's work. We dissected in pairs, two men to each part. My partner was a student called Benskin-a large, sandy-haired man who wore under his white coat a green check shirt and a red tie with little yellow dogs on it.

'What ho,' said Benskin.

'Good morning,' I replied politely.

'Are you conversant with the mysteries of anatomical dissection?' he asked.

'No. Not at all.'

'Nor I.'

We looked at each other silently for a few seconds.

'Perhaps we had better read the instructions in the dissecting manual,' I suggested.

We sat down on a pair of high wooden stools and propped the book against the dead thigh on the table in front of us. After turning over several preliminary pages we reached a drawing of a plump leg with bold red lines over it.

'That seems to be our skin incision,' I said, pointing to one of the lines. 'Will you start, or shall I?'

Benskin waved a large hand generously.

'Go ahead,' he said.

I drew a breath, and lightly touched the greasy rough skin. With my new scalpel I made a long sweeping incision.

'I think I've cut the wrong thing,' I said, glancing at the book.

'It doesn't look quite like the picture,' Benskin admitted. 'Perhaps we ought to raise some help.'

There were a pair of demonstrators in the dissecting room-young doctors passing grey years in the anatomy department for small wages in the hope of being appointed to the surgical staff of St. Swithin's in middle age. They flitted from one group of students to another like bees in a herbaceous border, pollinating each pair with knowledge. Both of them were far away from our table.

At that moment I caught sight of Grimsdyke, in a shining starched coat, strolling between the dissectors like an Englishman in a Suez bazaar. He waved languidly to me.

'How are you progressing?' he asked, crossing to our table. 'Good God, is that as far as you've got?'

'It's very difficult,' I explained. 'You see, we don't quite know how to start. Could you give us a bit of a hand?'

'But certainly, my dear old boy,' Grimsdyke said, picking up a scalpel. 'I have now dissected four legs and consider I have something of a flair for the knife. This is the gluteus maximus muscle.'

Grimsdyke slit his way rapidly through the muscles and in half an hour did our work for the week.

The routine of lectures and dissection passed the time agreeably. After a few weeks I began to distinguish more sharply the personalities of my fellow students, as an eye gradually sees the objects in a darkened room. My dissecting partner, Tony Benskin, was a cheery young man whose mental horizon was bounded by rugby football and beer drinking and clouded over only with a chronic scarcity of cash. Dissecting the fellow to our leg was the ginger-haired youth I had noticed at the Dean's lecture reading Darwin. He turned out to be a quiet and disturbingly brilliant Welshman called Evans, who started the course under the impetus of a senior scholarship. Evans dissected away conscientiously and efficiently from the start-which was fortunate, as his own companion rarely put in an appearance in the anatomy room at all. He was a handsome fellow named John Bottle, whose interests in life were ballroom dancing and the dogs. He spent most of his afternoons in the palais and his evenings at Harringay or the White City. The middle-aged man with the notebook I soon discovered to be an ex-bank clerk called Sprogget, who was left a little money after twenty years' looking at a ledger and immediately fulfilled an almost forgotten ambition of taking up medicine. Sprogget was unfortunate in being partnered by the most objectionable student in the class-a man named Harris, whom Grimsdyke named immediately the Keen Student. Harris knew everything. His greased black hair, parted precisely in the middle, and his thick-rimmed spectacles popped frequently between a pair of dissectors.

'You know, old man,' he would volunteer, 'you're not doing that bit according to the book. You ought to have exposed the nerve before you cut away the tendons. Hope you don't mind my mentioning it, but I thought it might save you a bit of trouble with the Prof later. I say, you've made a mess of the brachial artery, haven't you?'

He was incorrigible. He sat at the front of the lectures and asked grave questions to which he already knew the answers. He ate a lunch of sandwiches in the locker room of the anatomy department, reading a text-book; and his conversation was limited strictly to anatomy. He regarded the barracking to which he was inevitably subjected as another instance of persecution of the intellectuals.

Grimsdyke was a useful acquaintance, for his four years' start put him on familiar terms with the senior students. One afternoon shortly after my arrival he hailed me as I was walking out of the medical school doorway.