Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/95

80 mill we are always looking for that grinds folks young again.”

He was turning away laughing. Judith stopped him.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I do not know your address.”

“Bless me, don’t you! I thought all the world knew where the great Dr. Grey lived,” he returned in his jesting way. “There it is”—giving her his card—“Savile Row; and mind you find your way to it.”

Curious to say, that accidental interview, that simple giving of the card to Judith, led to an event quite unlooked for.

When Judith reached home—that is, her temporary home for the time being, Portland Place—she found the house in a sort of commotion, although it was the house of the dead. Lady Oakburn had dismissed her medical attendant, Dr. James.

She had done it, as she did most things, in a quiet, lady-like manner, but one entirely firm and uncompromising. Dr. James had by stratagem, by untruth, prevented a last interview between her and her husband, and she felt that she could not regard him again with feelings unallied to vexation and anger: it was better therefore that they should part. Dr. James urged that what he had done, he had done for the best, out of concern for her ladyship’s welfare. That, her ladyship did not doubt, she answered; but she could not forget or forgive the way in which it had been accomplished: in her judgment, Dr. James should have imparted to her the truth of her husband’s state, and then urged prudence upon her. It was the deceit she could not forgive, or—in short—countenance.

The result was the dismissal of Dr. James, and the dismay of the nurse in attendance upon the countess. The dismay extended itself to Lady Jane. Although the imprudence of Lady Oakburn on the previous night appeared not to have materially affected her, still she was not yet in a sufficiently convalescent state to be left without a medical attendant. Lady Oakburn appeared to think she was: she was not personally acquainted with any other doctor in London, she said to Jane, and seemed to dislike the idea of a stranger’s being called to her of whose skill she could know nothing. It was in this dilemma that Judith found the house on her return.

“Oh, my lady,” she exclaimed to her mistress on the spur of the moment, “if the countess would but call in Mr. Stephen Grey! He is so sure! he is so skilful! and she could not fail to like him.”

She extended the card as she spoke, and told of the recent interview. Jane listened, and carried the card to the countess.

“Let me send for him, Lady Oakburn,” she urged. “I do think it is necessary that you should have some one; and, as Judith says, you could not fail to like Dr. Grey.”

Lady Oakburn consented. Known well to Judith, partially to Lady Jane, he would not seem like a stranger: and Stephen Grey was sent for. It was the first step in the friendship that ensued between the Greys and Lady Oakburn: a friendship that was destined to bring great events in its train.

is now between forty and fifty years ago that Laennec, a French physician, followed up his happy invention of the stethoscope by founding an almost entirely new system of diagnosing, and consequently of treating, diseases peculiar to the organs of the chest. The senses of sight and of touch, which would alone seem available for any minute or accurate knowledge of changes taking place in a given organ, being in this instance almost useless, he had recourse to the ear, and taught it to read in the alterations of the sounds which accompany the healthy working of that portion of the human machine which lies within the chest, corresponding deviations from its natural and healthy condition.

He happened one day to be examining a patient suffering from heart disease, and the idea suddenly struck him, that the interposition of a cylinder of wood, or other material, between his ear and the patient’s chest would serve to intensify the sounds to be conveyed, and lead to a better notion of their significance. Acting on this idea, he rolled up a cylinder of card-board, and used it as a conductor of the sounds; and the result was such as he had anticipated.

Such was the first stethoscope, innumerable modifications of which have since been adopted with a view to greater convenience and perfection, but with no difference as to the ultimate purpose of the instrument. With this, indeed, as with almost every other appliance or apparatus used in medicine, the value of its results depends far less on its nearer approach to perfection than on the skill and loving zeal of its possessor; and certain it is, that no nicety of form or size will compensate for the smallest portion of the patient study, the tender handling, the nice discrimination, which must be brought to bear on this branch of his art, by him who seeks to excel in it.

Laennec was not the first who thought of