by A S Croyle
Sherlock was not one to fritter time away and almost at once, he seemed anxious. He immediately wandered off to listen to someone who was speaking about the deterioration of religion because of medical advances. Often he eschewed any philosophical or political discussions. Sometimes he seemed ignorant of both subjects, but he was not. He could quote Hafez, a fourteenth-century poet, and he frequently recited lines from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and other plays and framed them into politically relevant discussions about English government.
I was uncertain of Sherlock’s stand on religion. Perhaps because the existence of God could be neither proved nor disproved, he leaned toward agnosticism. How often he had said, “If all the possible hypotheses are eliminated except for one, then that hypothesis, no matter how unlikely, is the correct hypothesis.” Though he often lamented that life was pathetic and futile, he also referenced Biblical passages, if not citing them and then paraphrasing them, as he had that morning at the execution.
A few minutes later, Sherlock crossed the lawn and stood in front of the soapbox of another gentleman, and I followed. We listened to him for a moment. He had a round face, a high forehead, and thinning hair. He looked to be about my uncle’s age, mid-forties. He was speaking about atheism. The climate was ripe for controversial subjects. Though Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species twenty years ago, the debates about evolution raged on.
“Who is that, Sherlock?”
“Charles Bradlaugh,” Sherlock replied. “He is a courageous and stirring orator, Poppy. His skills will serve him well in Parliament.”
“Parliament?”
“He’s going to run for Parliament soon. I’m not sure he will get elected but if he does, it will be quite entertaining.”
“Why?”
“Because Bradlaugh is a passionate non-believer. He would be required to take a religious oath to take his seat. I don’t believe he will do it. He scoffs at those who claim to have particular knowledge of what a Creator wants us to think. He is a progressive who disagrees with the sentiments of those in government who insist that one must take a religious oath. He has no reverence for the little words they would force him to say and does not see why they are necessary. He’s been pressing the government to permit non-religious affirmations for years. If he can pull it off, he will be Britain’s first atheist MP.”
“Mother says that atheists are immoral. It was the one concern she had about my residing with Uncle and Aunt Susan.”
“Rubbish!” Sherlock yelled. “That is the battle cry of those who would preserve the myth that godless people are immoral. But those like Bradlaugh say that the answer to that canard is the promotion of science and logic. I must loan you my books by Auguste Comte, the French philosopher.”
“I have not read any of his works.”
“I am not convinced in the innate goodness of humanity, but Comte makes a good argument in his In Système de politique positive. He posits that the restoration of order and progress are the pillars of morality.”
He glanced in Bradlaugh’s direction again and said, “You should learn more about him, Poppy. Last year he published a pamphlet called “A Plea for Atheism,” and founded an influential magazine called The National Reformer. And he favours rights for women. Just last year, Bradlaugh was tried, with his friend Annie Besant, for publishing a pamphlet supporting birth control. He wants birth control methods to be available to the masses. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment and a large fine, but the verdict was overturned on appeal.”
I pondered this for a moment. It was another issue with which I wrestled. As a doctor sworn to save lives, did it contradict that duty if I supported the position that a woman could choose whether or not to conceive a child? Without artificial contraception, women frequently bore five or six or a dozen children. I’d seen the tragedy that lived in their haunted eyes. I’d seen how the children languished in miserable poverty and squalor, or were forever cursed with the imprint of violence when they were ‘rescued’ by degenerates like the man I’d just seen swing from the rope.
Most churches, not only the Roman Catholic Church, opposed artificial contraception. But I wondered... would it be better that these children were not born at all? Or should we just increase our efforts to feed and clothe and house them and put to death those who harmed them, as Sherlock advocated?
Sherlock waved his hand to the west. “That man over there is countering with all sorts of religious reasons why Bradlaugh should be arrested. He thinks Bradlaugh is a stealer of souls because he proffers that religious beliefs undermine modern medicine and because he renounces God, and, in particular, some religious rituals. He openly scoffs at priests who insist on telling their flocks that wine can turn into Christ’s blood.”
“Some people do believe that happens, Sherlock.”
He laughed and said, “Ah, yes, because nothing says rational thinker like transubstantiation.”
I did my best to hide a smile. I was used to Sherlock’s veiled swipes at the Holy Trinity. He thought of preachers as talking heads behind which there was always a ravishing candlelight, as if to emphasize their imagined halos. The perfect chiaroscuro to separate them from the less worthy.
I walked down to the bank of the river and gazed at the herd of swans, the silvery edges of their delicate feathers shimmering in the sunlight as they glided across the water, which shone like polished glass. One shook and trembled and undulated, and its long neck stretched high out of the water. Its feathers spread wide, casting a shadow that muted the rays of sunlight bouncing off the surface of the river, but as it slid away, the golden beams that sparkled on the water returned and glowed like an aurora or a rainbow. The water was glazed in violet-blue and gold and red, like the luster of an exotic bird’s glossy, iridescent plumage.
I watched wistfully as two swans came clearly into focus and met in the middle of the river, wings lifted like angels. They had drifted away from the others and gently rubbed each other’s beaks, then bobbed and dunked their heads below the surface, blowing bubbles in the water and wrapping their necks around each other in foreplay. Fascinated, I saw them dance their way toward bliss, like two exquisite performers in a ballet. They were so graceful, so beautiful.
First, they swam side by side, their wings lowered close to their bodies. They dipped their heads below the water surface and then pulled them back out and preened themselves. Again and again they did this, faster and faster, occasionally stopping to raise their necks, angle their heads down and look at each other. Then they moved almost as one, synchronizing their actions, united in the dance. They pressed their breasts to one another and raised and lowered their necks, staring into one another’s eyes. Their necks intertwined, one bird draped his neck over his partner’s and then the other did the same. Up and down, up and down, they lifted and lowered their heads and gently caressed each other’s long necks.
The male climbed on top of his mate in a swift move and the sounds of pleasure exploded in whistles and snorts. The episode was brief but magnificent. Afterward, in a synchronous movement, they circled one another, touching cheek to cheek, like newlyweds, in a charming exhibition of after-glow.
I found myself drowning in the serenity of it and in the warmth of the slanting sunlight. My sadness disappearing into a chimerical daydream, I rose from that dark vault and breathed in the soft tapestry surrounding me. The children laughing, a woman’s momentary smile, the flaxen flowers on the bank, the canopy of trees across the river hanging low, the swans’ wings striking the water, causing it to spout like a sputtering geyser in their wake. I felt transformed. The dismal gloom of the execution and Sherlock’s science and deduction and logic were the furthest things from my mind, and I felt compelled to keep them at bay.
I found Sherlock and tugged at his sleeve.
“I’m going to Covent Gardens Market.”
“But what about St. Bart�
�s?”
“Later. Come. Walk with me.”
It was about five miles from Victoria Park to the market, but at Sherlock’s brisk pace, we were there in less than an hour.
The market was teeming with chatter. I wandered from the flower women selling bouquets to women shelling walnuts. A cyclist riding a penny farthing beeped as he flew by, an Italian harpist entertained on one corner, and a shellfish stall holder sold oysters and whelks on another. Across the road stood a locksmith mending locks at his stall on the spot. Mush-Fakers - vendors who repaired umbrellas and collected discarded ones beyond repair in order to combine the good bits of two or more for sale - and ginger beer makers hurried back and forth with their carts. Sherlock bought some nuts and I also bought a bag for Uncle. Then I purchased some daisies for Aunt Susan and a ginger beer for myself, and hailed a cab to go home.
“Poppy, what are you doing?”
“I can’t go to Bart’s just now. I simply cannot. It’s... I’m done with death for today.”
He gave me an odd look. He had, after all, been with me when I attended to dozens of the dead and dying at the horrible train wreck in Norfolk a few years before. I’m sure he thought that I handled death quite well.
He was wrong.
I gave his arm a squeeze and said, “I’m going home.”
I looked around the market one more time. This was life, and not even Sherlock Holmes could convince me to abandon my belief in the infrangible human right to live.
4
A few weeks later, in early September, Sherlock sent a would-be page, one of his homeless helpers, to my medical office. The young boy was dressed in ragged clothes and tattered shoes. He looked sweaty and parched. Out of breath, he said, “Me name’s Rattle, Miss. Mr. ’olmes sent me t’ fetch yer.” Then he asked, “Kin I ’ave a drin’ a wa’er, Miss?”
“Of course.” I poured some water from a carafe into a glass and he drank it down in one gulp. “So Mr. Holmes is summoning me to St. Bart’s?”
He nodded. “T’ meet with ’imself and Detective Inspector Lestrade.”
“He is with Detective Inspector Lestrade? You are certain?”
If Lestrade was involved, some serious game was afoot.
“I’d sooner starve than lie, I would,” the boy said.
Glancing around my empty office and staring down at the page of my daily, which displayed nothing except a luncheon date with my friend Oscar Wilde, I mumbled with a sigh, “I certainly have nothing more pressing.”
“Wha’s tha’, Miss?”
I slammed the appointment book closed. I could not refuse Sherlock, but I wanted to show him that I did not have to drop everything at his beck and call. “I have some appointments and a luncheon engagement. Advise Mr. Holmes that I shall be there by three half. Tell him I shall meet him at the fountain.”
“The wha’, Miss?”
“The fountain at St. Bart’s. He shall know the place.”
“Bu’ ’e wans yer t’ come now. And ’e wans yer t’ read somefink in fis newspaper.” He shoved a copy of The London Daily News into my hands.
“Oh, he does, does he?” I snarled.
The boy nodded.
I glanced at the front page of the paper. There was a follow-up article to one I’d read in the spring that had reported Mr. Thomas Edison’s presentation to the Academy of Sciences about his new carbon telephone. Graham Bell had displayed his version of the device, which could transmit speech, a few years earlier at the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The exhibition judges, Emperor Dom Pedro II of the Empire of Brazil and Sir William Thompson, an eminent British physicist, took part in the experiments, and the voices of each were recognized by their accents and peculiarities of speech. They recommended Bell’s device to the Committee of Electrical Awards and he won the Gold Medal, but Mr. Edison’s new carbon telephone was a complete novelty. He had made changes in its design after he discovered that certain kinds of carbon are enormously susceptible to changes in conductivity when subjected to different pressures.
When I’d read that article, I thought it was just the kind of thing Sherlock would be keenly interested in, given his experiments with chemicals and different properties of ash, wood, blood and so on. I would have loved to get his opinion. But Sherlock and I were not on speaking terms at that time.
“Does Mr. Holmes want me to read this front page article about Mr. Edison?” I asked.
“Why is yer askin’ sich a ’eap of questions fer?”
“Which one, Rattle?”
“Th’one on page twenty and one, ’e says.”
I put the newspaper on my desk and said, “Do apologize to Mr. Holmes for the delay, but I have things to attend to.”
“Yer sure, Miss?”
“Quite sure.”
The boy grimaced and groaned, “Mr. ’olmes won’ be ’appy, Miss.” Then he said, “Good day to yer,” turned and left.
5
I busied myself for a while, cleaning instruments, and then reading an update in one of Uncle’s medical journals about risk management and surgical intervention in railway and industrial accidents. Railway surgeons had long been regarded with contempt by most physicians. After reading a disparaging article about them, Uncle Ormond said to me, “The level of discourtesy on the part of my colleagues is extremely unkind and entirely uncalled for. We know, Poppy, don’t we, what it is like to treat the victims of a railway accident?”
Oh, yes, I remembered. I still heard their voices in the night.
Uncle and I had been, by default, railway physicians for one horrible night in 1874, a night I would forever remember, one that had spurred in me a deep desire to promote and foster specialties in trauma and emergency medicine. We had treated dozens of injured passengers and railway employees scattered on the tracks that rainy, foggy night after the head-on collision near my home in Norfolk.
Like physicians who worked exclusively for the railway, we were faced with impossible conditions. One brakeman’s hand was crushed between a link-and-pin coupler. He had wrapped an oily rag around his severed hand. Unconscious, he was not found until the next day, his hand dangling, and his shoes and clothing awash in a pool of blood. By the time he was transferred to the nearest hospital, he was unconscious. Though Uncle amputed the hand, the poor soul had contracted gangrene and died a few days later.
But even without a crash, it was not unusual for a railway employee to sustain an injury during the scope of his employment - to have an arm or leg crushed - and he could not expect proper treatment. Such casualties, like the poor boy we could not save, were treated with old rags, oily handkerchiefs, or whatever was lying about, and transported for hours and miles in a chilly, dirty car. Too often, by the time a victim arrived at a hospital, he was grey and unconscious, or without a pulse at all, having bled to death, and his crushed limb was tossed into the rubbish. Sometimes, the patient did not even get to a hospital. More often, operations were performed out in the woods, on the backporch of some filthy house on the wayside, or occasionally in a nearby hotel room. But the rooms were rarely suitably equipped, and the railway were billed outrageously for room charges as well as replacement of bloodstained furnishings.
Railway doctors had no special training; they learned on the job, as they went. No major surgery textbooks would include the unique techniques involved in railway surgery until many years later, and the specialty would not appear in Index Medicus, the major index of medical literature, until 1903. Worse, railway surgeons were socially and professionally isolated, and they often lived a very difficult and austere life compared to their metropolitan counterparts. But, oh, they were innovative. They had to be, for railway and manufacturing facilities presented unique hazards and created new types of injuries to which most doctors, even brilliant surgeons like Uncle, were unaccustomed.
England’s railway surgeons wer
e just starting to learn techniques and methods from America’s Civil War doctors, for both the Union and Confederate armies had made extensive use of freight cars and bunk cars to transport injured soldiers to regional hospitals. Such locomotive ambulances were virtually non-existent in England when I started my practice. But railway surgery was finally being recognized as a specialty with its primary goal to study accident and trauma surgery, and in America, the railway surgeons had already introduced their concepts to civilian medicine. My country’s railway doctors were finally creaing emergency packs with medicines and sterile dressings for the trains, the forerunners of the first aid kit. They trained the railway workers as well. But ‘normal’ British physicians objected to this, feeling that laypersons could not administer medical care correctly.
“What they really fear,” Uncle said, “is that their own lofty importance might be diminished.”
He and I found this ridiculous; where urban surgeons operated was a far cry from the make-shift and filthy conditions under which we had worked at the Norfolk crash. We were ecstatic that these railway trauma surgeons were starting to be recognized for their revolutionary concepts in patient care. Uncle had recently read about a railway employee, a flagman, who broke his leg when it caught in a running gear. The conductor, who had received emergency training from the railway doctor, wrapped the jagged bone in sterile gauze, stabilized the leg with a splint, and gave him pain medication. A telegraph was sent to a nearby depot where a railway surgeon awaited the patient’s arrival. In a special car fitted with operating equipment, the boy was anesthesized; the doctor sterilized his hands with carbolic acid before setting the bones and stitching the wound. After a few weeks in the railway’s own hospital, the boy went home. He survived.
I had thought about closing up my faltering practice in London to become a railway doctor. The specialty was growing, and with the number of accidents and railway-employed doctors beginning to swell, I thought perhaps even a female doctor might be welcomed into the budding medical specialty.
