SURGEON AT ARMS

The same evening Desmond Trevose was entertaining his cousin Alec to dinner at high table in his Cambridge college.

Desmond had spent six months at Smithers Botham as Mr Twelvetrees' house-surgeon, and a further year as his registrar, which substituted for service in the thinning ranks of the Army. He was a good house-surgeon, competent and thoughtful, skilful enough with his hands as assistant in the theatre. But he was not really a success.

He was too cold, too brusque with the patients. He had no sense of human relationships. This was admittedly not a necessity for the effective, or even successful, medical man. Many renowned surgeons have been abominably rude. Others like Mr Cramphorn regarded hospital patients as simple-minded supplicants, unable to grasp such intellectual matters as the nature of the disease which irked them, which having a Latin name could only be discussed, if at all, by educated gentlemen. But the mood of the patients, like the mood of the nation, was becoming restless with smug authority. Medicine had advanced during the war as strikingly as aeronautics, the hospital doctor found himself turning into an applied scientist, yet the more he could do for his patients the less they seemed to regard him. It was baffling, not only for Mr Cramphorn. But the patients were only daring to express what they had expected from their medical attendants all along-to be their friend in health, their ally in sickness, and their companion in death, a relationship previously accorded only to those among them with a fee in their pockets.

Early in 1947 Desmond applied for a research scholarship at his old college, to study anatomy. It was in the blood. _The Synovial Membranes,_ the anatomical thesis by his grandfather the professor, published in the year of Desmond's birth, lay on the desk in his college rooms. The old boy had a few sound ideas, Desmond decided, though the bulk of the book was nonsense. But the synovial membranes, lining the joints of the body, might be worth a second look, and he had decided to spend a year taking it.

He had asked Alec to dinner through no feelings of duty or affection. After living with him for a year in the medical officers' mess at Smithers Botham, Desmond had allowed the lifelong tepidity of his feelings towards his cousin to cool into frosty dislike. But having him up for the night seemed the only way to pin him down. Desmond wanted his money back, and Alec showed reluctance even to discuss such ungentlemanly a subject.

'I hope you won't find that guest room too chilly,' said Desmond, standing before dinner amid the beams of his own sitting-room. 'Did my gyp light a fire? I expect he'll give you a hot-water bottle.'

'Don't I need a gown, or something?'

'Guests at dinner aren't required to wear them,' Desmond told him solemnly. 'What have you got there?'

'Gin.' Alec produced the bottle from inside his jacket. 'A brand I've never heard of, it's probably full of methyl alcohol, enough to turn you blind. Not to worry. I was damn lucky to get it. I thought it would be an acceptable present.'

'I'd rather not risk it, if you don't mind,' said Desmond warily. 'I've got some reasonable college sherry.'

'You won't mind if I drink the stuff?' Alec had brought the bottle only with this intention. Desmond was a mean host. 'Do you remember the trouble we had buying booze at Smithers Botham? That ghastly grocer with his wine counter.' Alec poured half a tumbler of gin, which he started to sip neat. 'It was a kindly Act of God which landed him on us with a strangulated hernia. Afterwards I believe he genuinely tried to do his best for his medical customers. He was dead scared he might find himself in our hands again.'

'Everyone drank far too much at Smithers Botham.'

'You know, I loved the place. A lot of people were browned off with it, but not me. I suppose it was because you could get away with anything. No stuffiness. Do you remember that party when some fellow kept insisting on lighting his own flatus with a match? It was quite sensational. Amused the girls terribly.'

'Aren't you drinking rather a lot yourself, Alec?'

'I expect I'm an alcoholic. My present employment is enough to make me one.' Alec had left Smithers Botham for a hospital in the north of England, where he was anaesthetic registrar. 'It's a ghastly hole. The town's all trains. They seem to go clanking and hooting everywhere, into tunnels, across viaducts, holding up all the traffic at level crossings. The hospital's dreadful. Not a gentleman in the place. All the residents are Irishmen, Indians, Scotsmen, those sort of people. No intellectual conversation. Anyway, drinking seems to do my asthma good.'

Desmond put his hands behind his back and pursed his lips. 'I thought you might have given conventional treatment a chance first.'