This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
BY
E. V. LUCAS
SECONDEDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
September 15th,1921 | |
Second Edition | 1921 |
Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was inthe habit of spending as many week-ends as possible at home withmy father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed.
On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railwaycompartment were an artist and his wife. I knew him to bean artist from certain scraps of his conversation that Ioverheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence ofhis hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore ablack velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at theankles, as in plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was ageneral careless ease about his tweeds that suggested theantipodes of any commercial or anxious calling.
After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town ofLowcester.
I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—atBullingham, five miles away—all my life.
“We are going to spend a few days at the Crown atLowcester,” he said, “looking about to try and find ahouse.”
p.2“There’s a very good house atBullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly gardentoo. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. Myfather’s the doctor.”
“Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speakingnow for the first time. “That would be a greatconvenience.”
One result of this chance meeting was that they took the houseand we became friends; another was the general shaping of mylife; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an oldman’s egoism and leisure.
I don’t put my own case as an example to the medicalprofession, but you can’t deny there is a kind of fitnessin it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor whopresides at the birth of a child should continue to take aninterest in that child throughout its life. Being born is,after all, something of an event, and he who assists in thatadventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a newbody) to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet ofours, ought to be counted as something a little more importantthan a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that thehouseholder calls in. For no matter how mechanical hisservices, he is also an instrument of destiny.
None the less, if accoucheurs were expected to p. 3follow thefortunes of every new arrival from the cradle to the grave one oftwo things would happen: either the medical profession woulddisappear for want of recruits, or home life (with the additionof the semi-parental doctor intervening between father andmother) would become more difficult than it already is. Perhaps then it is as well that the man-with-the-black-bagremains the piano-tuner that he more or less appears to be. But I shall continue to believe that so tremendous an affair as abirth should carry more fatefulness with it; although for thewell-being of patients I can see that it is better that doctorsshould be machines rather than