“Arteries always are in the wrong place,” said Newson.  “The normal’s the one thing you practically never get.  That’s why it’s called the normal.”

“Don’t say things like that,” said Philip, “or I shall cut myself.”

“If you cut yourself,” answered Newson, full of information, “wash it at once with antiseptic.  It’s the one thing you’ve got to be careful about.  There was a chap here last year who gave himself only a prick, and he didn’t bother about it, and he got septicaemia.”

“Did he get all right?”

“Oh, no, he died in a week.  I went and had a look at him in the P. M. room.”

Philip’s back ached by the time it was proper to have tea, and his luncheon had been so light that he was quite ready for it.  His hands smelt of that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that morning in the corridor.  He thought his muffin tasted of it too.

“Oh, you’ll get used to that,” said Newson.  “When you don’t have the good old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely.”

“I’m not going to let it spoil my appetite,” said Philip, as he followed up the muffin with a piece of cake.

LV

Philip’s ideas of the life of medical students, like those of the public at large, were founded on the pictures which Charles Dickens drew in the middle of the nineteenth century.  He soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if he ever existed, was no longer at all like the medical student of the present.

It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless.  They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds come to an end or because angry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away from the hospital.  Others find the examinations too hard for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which before they had so pat.  They remain year after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men:  some of them crawl through the examination of the Apothecaries Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end.  But for the most part medical students are industrious young men of the middle-class with a sufficient allowance to live in the respectable fashion they have been used to; many are the sons of doctors who have already something of the professional manner; their career is mapped out:  as soon as they are qualified they propose to apply for a hospital appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the Far East as a ship’s doctor), they will join their father and spend the rest of their days in a country practice.  One or two are marked out as exceptionally brilliant:  they will take the various prizes and scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject or another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.