field for fathering experience in pauper wards!
I believed I could shake my head, look solemn
and be mysteriously silent, with the highest
practitioners. It was something to frighten my
female cousins—dear innocent girls—with
appalling accounts of "magnificent operations."
They listened to me with curious interest and
no small fear. I think Mary's regard for me
began with fear, and that then (sensible girl as
she was) she thought of marrying me. A young
surgeon who accomplished such extraordinary
feats would, she believed, be a good provider,
and would be able to cure her, no matter what
happened to her. Unfortunately, before I could
obtain a License to Kill, it was necessary to
pass examinations. Here, again, arose the
great barrier to my fortune. Success, you
perceive, did not depend upon myself; it
depended altogether on the way in which questions
might be put to me: that is, in the obstetric
skill of my questioners.

Through my boyhood and youth I had
experienced the supreme ignorance of my
interrogators. I never could answer them, and an
ominous quaking of the heart, as the day of
trial approached, warned me not to hope that
the Socratic science had been vigorously cultivated
now. I had walked the hospitals, attended
the prescribed number of lectures, copied
out notes made by men who had been fortunate
in obtaining somewhat enlightened examiners,
I had invested in a skeleton, made up twenty–
two pages of the Pharmaceutical Latin Grammar,
and tried to master those extraordinary
hieroglyphics by which physicians will persist in
marking the quantities of ingredients in a
draught. May I, a hater of questions, venture
to ask a question plainly? Why is it that prescriptions
must be written in dog-Latin, miserably
abbreviated? What magic is there in writing
pil, pul, cyath, haust, instead of the honest
English words which these fragments indicate?
I know that these abbreviations puzzled me
wofully, and that I nearly killed a wretched old
woman—luckily, she was only a pauper—by
mistaking the meaning of one of these cabalistic
symbols. The whole world is behind the age.
In village shops I still see monosyllabic
signs in gold letters, labelling poisons, where
the administrating Æsculapius is the druggist's
younger son. I compassionate the insides
of the village rustics, and think that the laud.
tinct. and op. extr. might just as well be labelled
"quietness." But I am in advance of my
generation—like Socrates.

The day of my examination came, and never
in all my life did I meet with questioners so
densely ignorant. They were not able to extract
a single answer out of my inner consciousness.
I ventured upon an expedient which had
proved successful in a case somewhat similar to
my own. A dignified examiner blandly asked
me what I would prescribe for a case of aneurosis
cerebri. I politely replied, "I would implicitly
adopt the formula given in his recent valuable
paper on the subject." A smile mantled on his
tranquil features, and I believed I was safe.

Unfortunately, fools rush in where angels fear
to tread, and one malicious fool—he was the
youngest and the most ignorant of all my
examiners—asked me to repeat the formula. Now,
I never could get off Latin by heart. I never
could see the use of it. To make a secret of
medicine by hiding it under an outlandish tongue
is un-English and unpatriotic. Despair, however,
impelled me to violate my principles, and
endeavoured to supply an answer. I do not
precisely remember what prescription I gave;
but I know there was a general start among my
examiners, and one of them rather stiffly said:
"Young gentleman, that dose would kill a mammoth
on the spot." I was plucked.

My meeting with Mary was rather trying.
She had rightly expected great things of me,
for she did not know how great was the stupidity
of men in high positions. The student who had
operated most successfully in excising aneurism
of the aorta, and restoring by artificial vertebræ
the back-bone of a railway victim, could
do anything, she thought. She, too, began to
question me. Did I love her, as fondly now as
then? Did I wish our engagement to continue?
Would I be content to wait? &c., &c. These
were intelligent questions nicely put, and, of
course, I answered them most satisfactorily.
But when she inquired, What I intended to do
now? What medical school would I study in?
When I should "go in" again? When she
did this, and put other interrogatories of a
similar kind, I lamented her deficient
acquaintance with the Socratic theory, and was
silent.

In my despair I hired "a coach." This
gentleman put into my hands a very little book
in dreadful dog-Latin, containing answers to
all imaginable questions. He directed me to
learn by rote, every day, two or, if possible,
three pages, and then for one hour daily he
tortured me by putting the same question in
every possible variety of form. He said that
tlie one reply might serve for twenty queries,
and he trusted that, by putting the questions in
every imaginable shape, he would anticipate my
examiners. He worked hard with me, and
I mastered three hundred replies to three
thousand imaginary questions. I was well
coached, and could certainly repeat much more
of the Pharmacopœia than I ever understood, but
what of that? Disease was to be cured by
medicine; medicine was prescribed by symbols:
given the type of the disease and the symbols,
all was easy.

I went before a Board in Scotland; but neither
my coach nor I had calculated that I would be
called upon, not only to write out prescriptions
when the types of disease were given, but to
translate any prescriptions my examiners might
think of puzzling me with. I broke down here—
broke down utterly. Next day, I found appended
to my ill-used name, this note: "Lamentably
ignorant—could not translate a prescription." I
venture to say it was not my function to translate
a prescription; that was the druggist's business.
But remonstrance was vain, and one of my