I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting a skeleton for use in the evenings with the anatomical text-books. I found one in a shop off Wigmore Street and took it back to my digs. Most landladies had become accustomed to a skull to be dusted on the mantelpiece and a jumble of dried bones in the corner, but students moving into lodgings that had previously sheltered such inoffensive young men as law or divinity pupils were sometimes turned out on the grounds that their equipment precipitated in the good lady a daily attack of the creeps.
For the first two years of their course medical students are not allowed within striking distance of a living patient. They learn the fundamentals of their art harmlessly on dead ones. The morning after the Dean's lecture the new class was ordered to gather in the anatomical dissecting room to begin the term's work.
The dissecting room was a high, narrow apartment on the ground floor of the medical school that exhaled a strong smell of phenol and formaldehyde. A row of tall frosted glass windows filled one wall, and the fluorescent lights that hung in strips from the ceiling gave the students themselves a dead, cyanotic look. The wall opposite the windows supported a length of blackboard covered with drawings of anatomical details in coloured chalks. In one corner was a stand of pickled specimens, like the bottles on a grocer's shelves, and in the other a pair of assembled skeletons grinned at each other, suspended from gallows like the minatory remains of highwaymen. Down the room were a dozen high, narrow, glass-topped tables in two rows. And on the tables, in different stages of separation, were six or seven dissected men and women.
I looked at the bodies for the first time curiously. They were more like mummies than recently dead humans. All were the corpses of old people, and the preserving process to which they had been subjected had wrinkled them beyond that of ageing. Four untouched subjects lay naked and ready for the new class, but at the other tables the senior students were already at work. Some of the groups had advanced so far that the part they were dissecting was unidentifiable to an unknowing onlooker like myself; and here and there a withered, contracted hand stuck out in silent supplication from a tight group of busy dissectors.
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
We nodded nervously, like a squad of recruits listening to their first drill sergeant.
