AUTHOR'S MEDICAL CAREER.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 134, 3 December 1910, Page 10

AUTHOR'S MEDICAL CAREER.

SIR A. CONAN DOYLE'S ADVICE TO STUDENTS. The " Romance of Medicine " formed the subject of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's address to the students of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School. Sir A. Conan Uojle, after an amusing reference to his own medical career, went on to eulogise the training of the mind which a medical education gave. The healthy scepticism which was inculcated by a medical training, he said, was a thing to value. A man, he continued, who had gone through the years of work with the examinations like the hedges of a steeplechase at the end of each year will find that he has had a moral training, and has learned to keep his head in critical moments. I should recommend tl^is course of training to any young man with a competency, even though he has no wish to practise in the profession. A high standard of strenuous work will be revealed to him. For a man who really knows " Gray's Anatomy," earth owns no further terrors. This healthy materialism which carefully considers evidence is only part of an early course, and when the postgraduate course called life is met it will clear away all materialism. Your training teaches you something about the laws of Nature, and you will find that at .the back of the law is the Maker of the law. A strong and kindly personality,, the speaker continued, was as valuable as personal knowledge, but by kindliness he did not mean that trained urbanity known as "the bedside manner." No .i doctor should be a pessimist; he must believe the best and he would effect it*. Here Sir Arthur told a story of a friend of his who believed in conveying the power of expectation. When a patient was not very seriously ill he would say : " Take three doses of this medicine, then look at youii watch ; exactly at 3. 15 all symptome will disappear." The patient usually recovered. The romance of the world was often seen, he said, by ,tho medical man and by him alone. Wigs were worn at one time, and wigs were absurd. It was only a fashion, but it was caused by a monarch becoming bald from a disease known as alopecia. Another monarch suffered from laryngitis, and his courtiers put whispering in fashion. , Then there were the three great sufferers in the World's .history— Julius Caesar, Mahomet, and Napoleon. The first two were epileptics. Shakespeare knew about Julius Caesar's trouble, as in Act I. Scene 1, of tho tragedy there are these lines : Cassius : But, soft, I pray you i What! did Caesar swoundT? Casca : He fell down in the' marketplace, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless. Brutus : 'Tis very like ; he hath thft falling sickness. The year 1802 began a tragedy. Napo. leon then showed the first signs of the malignant disease which eventually killed him. At Waterloo the mutinous cells of his own mucous membrane fought against him. Years afterwards the clinic which was held over his body showed that there was cancer all over his stomach, with a perforation at the hepatic border. History abounded in such grim romances. The French Revolution afforded quite a pathological museum. Marat, with his skin disease which made him take saline baths, might have lived had not Charlotte Corday known where to catch and murder him. Robespierre suffered from his " greeh-veined biliousness." The most wonderful romance of all was that of the English work of dragging out hidden enemies, turning the merely empirical into the exact. Such names as Harvey, Manson, Ross, Bruce, and Wright — each had a wonderful story to tell. Ross, with a rusty microscope, did work on malaria which banished the disease from Italy, Greece, lsmalia, and Rumania. Others had by discovering the gnat which carried the disease made the Panama Canal possible. Then there was opsonic research. He finished by quoting Abernethy who, in addressing a set of medical students, said : " Good God, gentlemen, what is going to become of you all?" To which the modern reply was: there is work ready for all; hard work for moat, competency for a few, and wealth for none. The work had a higher ideal than dollars.