DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE полностью

Grimsdyke's reluctance to pass examinations was wholly the fault of his grandmother, a well-to-do old lady who had passed the long-drawn-out twilight of her life in Bournemouth. As she had nothing else to occupy her she developed a wide selection of complaints, which were soothed away, all in good time, by the expensive attentions of her charming physicians. Her regard for the medical profession mounted with each indisposition, and was tempered only with the regret that she had not a single medical gentleman in her own family. The only person who could have rectified the omission was young Grimsdyke, and she conceived the idea while he was still at school of enticing him into the profession by offering to pay his expenses for the course. Unfortunately, the grandmother shortly afterwards developed a malady beyond the abilities of her doctors and was carried away; but her will contained a clause bequeathing a thousand a year to the young man during the time that he was a medical student.

Grimsdyke did not immediately realize the full significance of this, and had begun his first year's study at St. Swithin's before it dawned on him that he had an excellent opportunity to spend the rest of his life in London on a comfortable allowance without the tedium of doing any work. He therefore took great pains always to fail his examinations. He came to the hospital once or twice a week, paid his fees promptly, and behaved himself, which was sufficient for St. Swithin's. He had a flat in Knightsbridge, an old two-seater car (known as The Ulcer, because it was always breaking down), a large number of friends, and plenty of spare time. 'I sometimes think,' he would admit to his cronies, 'I have discovered the secret of graceful living.'

About the time that I joined the medical school Grimsdyke's spacious days became limited. He had fallen in love with a girl and proposed to her, but she was a shrewd young woman and not only discovered the secret of his existence but refused to accept him unless he altered it.

'An embryo doctor, yes,' Grimsdyke would explain sadly, 'but a chronic hanger-on in a medical school, no. I was obliged to go out and buy some books. The power of women, my dear old boy. It is for them that men climb mountains, fight wars, go to work, and such unpleasant things.'

She must have had the personality of a Barbary slave-master, for he thenceforward applied himself to his studies as enthusiastically as anyone else in the hospital.

As there were no classes arranged for the day of the Dean's lecture I had the afternoon to myself. I slipped off quietly from the King George shortly after a bunch of senior students burst in and started a noisy drinking session with Grimsdyke. The lighthearted way which my new companions slipped down pints of beer alarmed me. I drank very little, for I had recently left school and was under the impression that more than two glasses of beer ruined your rugger and led to equally serious moral degeneration.

'So you are going in for-um-medicine?' my housemaster had said to me during my final term.

'Yes, sir.'

'A very-er-esteemed profession, Gordon, as you should know. Unfortunately, I find the means of entry to it seems to have a bad influence on boys of even the highest character. No doubt the effect of dealing daily with the-um-fundamental things in life, as it were, is some excuse. Yet I must warn you to exercise continual restraint.'

'Oh yes, sir. I will, of course, sir.'

'I expect you will soon become as bad as the rest,' he sighed. His small opinion of medical students sprang largely from the days when he had been reading theology at Cambridge and, on his attempt to break up a noisy party of medicals in the adjoining rooms late one night, he had been forcibly administered an enema of Guinness's stout.

I had lunch alone at the A.B.C. and went down to a medical bookshop in Bloomsbury to buy some text-books. I had to get a copy of Gray's Anatomy, the medical student's bible, an unquestionable authority on anatomy as Hansard on a parliamentary debate. When I saw the book my heart sank under its weight. I flicked over the two thousand foolscap pages of detailed anatomical description split up by beautiful bold drawings of yellow nerves, bright red arteries, and blue veins twining their way between dissected brown muscles that opened like the petals of an unfolding flower. I wondered how anyone could ever come to learn all the tiny facts packed between its covers as thickly as the grains in a sack of wheat. I also bought a set of volumes giving directions for dissection of the body, a thick tome on physiology full of graphs and pictures of vivisected rabbits, and a book of Sir William Osler's addresses to medical students.

'Is there anything else, sir?' the assistant asked politely.

'Yes,' I said. 'A skeleton. Do you happen to have a skeleton?'

'I'm sorry, sir, but we're out of skeletons at the moment. The demand on them is particularly heavy at this time of the year.'