Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/262



HRISTOPHER, having put the second part of the Cambridge M.B. behind him, and sailed through the Anatomy and Physiology of the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, now moved in the thick of his hospital training. There were the lectures on medicine and surgery, pathology and bacteriology, and gynecology, also the clinical lectures on the same subjects. He rolled bandages and applied splints. He served as out-patient clerk and dresser, and later as clerk and dresser in the wards. In the out-patient departments of St. Martha's he was brought into touch with the realities of sickness and disease, and having more vision than the ordinary medical student he began to understand what was at the back of these realities. He saw what London did to people, and what people did to themselves and to each other. He saw the blotched bodies, the sores, the rottennesses, the stigmata stamped there by poor festering souls. He saw men and young girls filthy with venereal disease; and the blurred and shiny faces and angry eyes of the drunkards. Often it seemed to him that Fate herded these people like cattle into the white-tiled galleries and the out-patient rooms, poor stupid cattle sinned against, ignorantly sinning. It was the problem of the ignorant, of the unfit, of the people with uncontrolled lusts and greeds, of ugly lives and ugly souls and bodies growing out of them, of children who should never have been born.

"What a mess!" was Kit's feeling about it.

Sometimes pity moved him, sometimes nausea.

He began to have a profound respect for Mr. Kennard, the particular assistant surgeon to whom he was attached as dresser, and in a little while Kennard returned that respect. Sorrell had a reputation in the hospital. He was keen, deliberate, ready to accept small responsibilities. Most young men funk their responsibilities, but Kit did not.