The patient retired sulkily, with an angry scowl.
"She'll probably write a letter to the papers on the gross mismanagement of the London hospitals," said Dr. Tyrell, with a smile, as he took the next paper and gave the patient one of his shrewd glances.
Most of them were under the impression that the hospital was an institution of the state, for which they paid out of the rates, and took the attendance they received as a right they could claim.
They imagined the physician who gave them his time was heavily paid.
Dr. Tyrell gave each of his clerks a case to examine.
The clerk took the patient into one of the inner rooms; they were smaller, and each had a couch in it covered with black horse-hair: he asked his patient a variety of questions, examined his lungs, his heart, and his liver, made notes of fact on the hospital letter, formed in his own mind some idea of the diagnosis, and then waited for Dr.
Tyrell to come in. This he did, followed by a small crowd of students, when he had finished the men, and the clerk read out what he had learned.
The physician asked him one or two questions, and examined the patient himself.
If there was anything interesting to hear students applied their stethoscope: you would see a man with two or three to the chest, and two perhaps to his back, while others waited impatiently to listen.
The patient stood among them a little embarrassed, but not altogether displeased to find himself the centre of attention: he listened confusedly while Dr. Tyrell discoursed glibly on the case.
Two or three students listened again to recognise the murmur or the crepitation which the physician described, and then the man was told to put on his clothes.
When the various cases had been examined Dr. Tyrell went back into the large room and sat down again at his desk.
He asked any student who happened to be standing near him what he would prescribe for a patient he had just seen.
The student mentioned one or two drugs.
"Would you?" said Dr. Tyrell. "Well, that's original at all events.
I don't think we'll be rash."
This always made the students laugh, and with a twinkle of amusement at his own bright humour the physician prescribed some other drug than that which the student had suggested.
When there were two cases of exactly the same sort and the student proposed the treatment which the physician had ordered for the first, Dr. Tyrell exercised considerable ingenuity in thinking of something else.
Sometimes, knowing that in the dispensary they were worked off their legs and preferred to give the medicines which they had all ready, the good hospital mixtures which had been found by the experience of years to answer their purpose so well, he amused himself by writing an elaborate prescription.
"We'll give the dispenser something to do.
If we go on prescribing mist: alb: he'll lose his cunning."
The students laughed, and the doctor gave them a circular glance of enjoyment in his joke.
Then he touched the bell and, when the porter poked his head in, said:
"Old women, please."
He leaned back in his chair, chatting with the H.P. while the porter herded along the old patients.
They came in, strings of anaemic girls, with large fringes and pallid lips, who could not digest their bad, insufficient food; old ladies, fat and thin, aged prematurely by frequent confinements, with winter coughs; women with this, that, and the other, the matter with them.
Dr. Tyrell and his house-physician got through them quickly.
Time was getting on, and the air in the small room was growing more sickly.
The physician looked at his watch.
"Are there many new women today?" he asked.
"A good few, I think," said the H.P.
"We'd better have them in.
You can go on with the old ones."
They entered.
With the men the most common ailments were due to the excessive use of alcohol, but with the women they were due to defective nourishment.
By about six o'clock they were finished.
Philip, exhausted by standing all the time, by the bad air, and by the attention he had given, strolled over with his fellow-clerks to the Medical School to have tea.
He found the work of absorbing interest.
There was humanity there in the rough, the materials the artist worked on; and Philip felt a curious thrill when it occurred to him that he was in the position of the artist and the patients were like clay in his hands.
He remembered with an amused shrug of the shoulders his life in Paris, absorbed in colour, tone, values, Heaven knows what, with the aim of producing beautiful things: the directness of contact with men and women gave a thrill of power which he had never known.
He found an endless excitement in looking at their faces and hearing them speak; they came in each with his peculiarity, some shuffling uncouthly, some with a little trip, others with heavy, slow tread, some shyly.
Often you could guess their trades by the look of them.
You learnt in what way to put your questions so that they should be understood, you discovered on what subjects nearly all lied, and by what inquiries you could extort the truth notwithstanding.
You saw the different way people took the same things.
The diagnosis of dangerous illness would be accepted by one with a laugh and a joke, by another with dumb despair.
Philip found that he was less shy with these people than he had ever been with others; he felt not exactly sympathy, for sympathy suggests condescension; but he felt at home with them.
He found that he was able to put them at their ease, and, when he had been given a case to find out what he could about it, it seemed to him that the patient delivered himself into his hands with a peculiar confidence.
"Perhaps," he thought to himself, with a smile, "perhaps I'm cut out to be a doctor.
It would be rather a lark if I'd hit upon the one thing I'm fit for."
It seemed to Philip that he alone of the clerks saw the dramatic interest of those afternoons.