THE WAS-DOCTOR.

Otago Witness, Issue 3969, 8 April 1930, Page 77

THE WAS-DOCTOR.

By

C. J. Cutcliffe-Hyne.

( Copyright.—For the Otago Witness. ) As a red-haired medical student, a hard-working G.P. collecting capital, and a specialist beating up a practice, John Windermere spent fifteen laborious years before he got to be known in surgical circles as one of the big forces of Harley street. The small mistake that cost him this accumulation occupied less than fifteen seconds.

His trouble was, he had always been a foolishly kind-hearted man, though Scotch.

The patient who let him down was not a friend. She was not even likely to pay a fee. She was merely a woman in a mess who had blown into his con-sulting-room out of space. Out of that mess, being kind-hearted, Windermere tried to help her. The operation, which went wrong, was a very ordinary one. She told before she died, and Dr Windermere was considered uncommonly lucky in getting off with six years, and, of course, the loss of all his professional qualifications. The Medical Trades Unions are very thorough in these matters, and quite rightly so. It is their job to keep- the profession’s tail stiffly erect. The doctor who let him down was a specialist competitor in Wimpole street. He could have held his tongue and the trouble would never have arisen. As it was, he and Windermere shared the practice in their particular speciality—an obscure gland—and he felt he would like the whole of it. With Windermere removed he had the lot in his own hands, and his income was automatically doubled from that year onwards.

Jock M'Winder of the scarlet hair blew into the island of Foil one autumn with a record at his tail of a summer spell of tattie-howking near West Kilbride, and haymaking and harvesting elsewhere in Ayrshire, by which he had accumulated some small monies and a never-perishing thirst. He picked up a second-hand blue jersey, and a fourteenth-hand double-ende'd boat of the Loch Fyne type which was fitted with a Kelvin motor that wouldn’t work. His shore residence, when he took it over, consisted of four mud and rubble walls, and a sod-and-heather roof which occupied space where the floor ought to have been.

In view of the shortening West Highland days and the hint of winter in the air, building operations would have seemed to the ordinary mind a thing to be got along with. Jock M‘Winder’, however, with money in his pocket, preferred whisky and conversation. The whisky, sold by Rabbie Bruce, the local merchant, who was also the publican, was measured out in generous tots from bottles which still carried the rubbed remains of the labels used by the best advertised brands. The spirit itself, however, came from a fount which had its source somewhere up in the high blue hills in the middle of Foil, and was of the good old Highland get-there variety. This brand is entirely different from that 30 U.P. wash for which a Pharisaical Government makes you and me, sir, pay out our hard-earned 12s fid a’ bottle. As regards conversation, most Hebridean crofters are willing to break into their twenty-four hours per diem set apart for sleep and doing nothing by stirring up for, say, half an afternoon’s chat, provided the matter is handled diplomatically. It is entirely libellous to say that the West Highlander of the present year of grace is bone idle. He will talk for quite decent spells if the conversation is about his ancestry, or some subject that interests him, and

he will also sit up for occasional meals, if food is brought to him. The forward end of the Loch Fyne double-ender was decked in up to her mainmast, and in the triangular space so enclosed Hebridean crofters in that earlier day when work was still their occasional habit, had lived, and fugged, and scratched themselves, and eaten fresh-caught herring or the white fish directly out of the frying-pan. Jock M'Winder, being a West Highlander himself, did not mind the dirt and squalor that was thrown in gratis as cabin furniture to his purchase, but bought a blanket, and as a concession to tastes acquired during some fifteen years of exile, insect 'powder. Later, having got sick of cooking saithe in a hanunered-out corned beef can, ho added to his penates a frying-pan, which he got from credit from Rabbie Bruce.

Later, when the days grew shorter, and snow flurries blew across the sea loch ex cry afternoon, and the Northern Lights lit up most evenings, this redheaded Jock took back with him one day a scratchy Austrian pencil and a cheap Belgian paper block, and (by request) started upon the “ Bruce Saga.” “ Satan,” he reminded himself, “ finds undesirable jobs still for idle hands to do, and what could be more loathsome than committing to paper the actual history of the Bruces since King Robert of that ilk reigned in Scotland, circa 1300? They started by being politicians and murderers, and the only real height they’ve risen to, in the person of Rabbie, is a knack for brewing the worst whisky in the Outer Islands. Of course, that’s something. Question is, am I going to write this chain of biographies on a groundwork of slobber or fact? Slobber on the usual lines would have the usual sale. Fact, solid fact about the Bruce clan would have a bumper sale; and then there’d be loud cries of ‘Author,’ and some bright pressmen would blow it into Foil one morning, and—No, by the saints! Nothing doing. The ‘ Bruce Saga ’ will have to go to the stereotyped ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum ’ lines.”

Still, Rabbie, whose one passion in life xx as the recitation of Bruce biography to the glow of winter evening peats, xx anted the stuff down on paper, and somehow hit upon the newly-arrived red-head as penman. So, as Jock M'Winder was always a foolishly kindhearted man, he did violence to his feelings and took off the absorbent paper block and the scratchy pencil to his ancient double-ender, and lit his triangular residence with paraffin. Writing was one of the many things he hoped he had left behind him for ever. But it struck him that the “ Bruce Saga,” properly dished up, would be a money-making proposition. I believe I have already mentioned that though he was a foolishly kind-hearted man, mv blue-jerseyed waster was also Scotch.

Rabbie Bruce, like his better-known ancestor, King Robert of 1274-1329, was just about as twisty a citizen as any land could produce, and though he was extremely sound on family history, the trifles of statesmanship and military prowess which crept into it left him cold. But a crooked deal over sheep which the Bruce won, or a spate of artistic perjury by which one of the Clan got an inconvenient husband hanged, were items he could dictate with gusto, and over that great occasion in 1763 when Hector Bruce hurled the two English bagmen into his stronghold and robbed them of their trousers, and so for the first time was able to discard the family kilt, nothing but blank verse could give full value to his views of the triumph. Jock M'Winder of the scarlet head saw some of the humour of this, but not all. He was Hebridean-bred himself, and though Aberdeen University and the various medical practices which culminated in Harley street had "iven him an English surface-finish, thatspell in gaol and latterly the breezes of the Minch had dulled this of much of its polish. A man necessarily had shed most of his sense of humour by the time he is hardened enough to grow an eightinch red beard.

So “ The Bruce Saga ” crept into manuscript, page by page, and whatever faults it had, one could admit truly that it spread a new light on personages who would have liked to have been considered historical. Jock M‘Winder had a style of*writing that I should describe as a wee crampit; but it was pawky in places, and it had all the scientific man’s fervour for accuracy in detail. It was a new vehicle for historical biography, and I am not saying it was a good one. But new things, at the rate of one in twenty-five, catch the public taste, and this grimy record of historical rascalities went with a buzz from the first day the trade subscribed it. A small London publisher took a chance at it, the gallant fellow, on no royalty for the first 2500, and 10 per cent, thereafter, and Jock, though Scotch, was fool enough to' agree.

The reviews for the most yart either damned or neglected it. But then reviewers are 90 per cent. Scots, who hate anything that proved that their heroes are human, or in any other way dims the voltage of the Northern Lights. However, reviews do not sell books, and what does, no man knows. “ The Bruce Saga,” badly printed and meanly bound, got rid of edition after edition at 12s fid, and in six months had achieved, for a book of that description, the incredible score of 14,727 copies—or at least that is what the publisher reported to J. M'Winder, esq., c/o Post Office, Foil. The small publisher, belauding his own generosity, and saying he was under no possible obligation to do it, sent the distant author £7O on account, and mentioned that he expected naturally to have first option on all future works. A holiday-making journalist, smelling copy, tried to touch J. M'Winder for an interview, but got no further than Rabbie Bruce. Mr M'Winder, it seemed, was away yachting (in the double-ended Loch Fyne boat), and Rabbie, with a shaven upper lip as long as a monkey’s, had no information aboot the fella’. The current representative of the Clan Bruce had suddenly arrived at the lamentable fact that he had been giving away gratis valuable copy without a bawbee of cash consideration in return, and by reason of the thriftiness in his blood, felt justifiably sore. He decided that for tribal reasons he was bound to take it out of Jock M'Winder somehow.

The £7O he proved to be owing already for whisky, canned goods, a toothbrush, and one pound nine and a half ounces of tobacco. So he announced, with the long upper lip at its most austere length, that as Red Jock did not fish to profit, and had no taste for the sheep, he must earn dividends in another way. The old doctor who was supposed to physic the three islands of Foil, Bentigula, and Ull, was merely a sick man most of his time, and a drunken man always when he could get out as far as the nearest whisky emporium. Rabbie produced a copy of the “ Home Doctor ” and presented it to J. M'Winder. “ Doctering’s simple enough, Jock, if only you take pains to learn it. Otherwise, the old doctor couldn’t have carried on all these years. Learn it up. You’ve to earn money for me if you want to go on living here in Foil.”

Jock M'Winder combed his tangled red beard with grimy fingers—“ I’ll have a try, Rabbie, if you put it that way, though I think fishing’s more my line of goods these days. However, as you say, doctoring ought to be easy enough, if it’s all in this shilling book, and there’s a woman who goes round the islands to do the midwifery. God help the customer who wants me to do an abdominal. Oughtn't you to advance me a shilling or two to lay in some tackle? Barring your infernal whisky and the family meat saw, I haven’t seen any . what you might call up-to-date surgical appliances on this blessed island since I landed here.” * V ¥

For a grimy, hairy man whose clothes were usually covered with fish scales, and who was frequently overloaded with the inland’s ferocious whisky, Jock was very quick at picking up a medical practice. Perhaps this was due to Rabbie’s persuasion—and as all of the islanders dealt at his store and most were in debt there, he could probably pull a string or two; perhaps it was due to the way he had absorbed the great truths of medicine, as set forth in the shilling “Home Doctor”; perhaps, as these Westerners said, he was born with some trick of physicking and mending. Anyv ay, as I have said, he was sent for here, there, and everywhere throughout Foil, Bentigula, and Ull, to the detriment of any inclinations he may have had for the business of fishin" For surgery he carried round the pocket knife with which he operated on haddock, and a packing needle which was used’ alternately for the intestinal troubles of his pipe; his only drug was a rusty tin of Epsom salts he found in Rabbie’s store, and though for serious eases he bolstered aqueous solutions of salts with a dollop of burnt sugar, he could hardly claim to ranging widely over the pharmacopoeia. But there were no professional jealousies in those distant islands. In case of medical accidents old Dr Crumme, who was a F.R.C.S. (Sheffield) was always sufficiently sober to sign a death certificate, if he got tirenecessary half-crown cash down in advance. As Fergus M'Alister, the U.P. kirkyard grave digger, admitted, he and the old doctor were there to cover up Jock’s mistakes. , 1

Then one day, on the front end of a gale of wind, there swooped down into the Foil anchorage a black 16ft whaleboat. She was snugged down to her last reef, and though Donald Fraser who was handling her had been a blue-water man. before he had turned farmer in Bentigula, he frankly disliked his job. “ Plain blow,” said Donald, “ I know how to handle; none better. But the tide rips in and among this graveyard put the wind up me, and I don’t mind admitting it. I was for coopering the feller meself, same as one has to do at sea But General Perkins was all for having a proper doctor, and Isa sent me for old Crumme, if he was sufficiently sober to get doxvn to the boat.” “He isn’t,” said Rabbie Bruce. “ The laird in Ull Was fool enough to send the old man a cheque last week, and he took to his bed at once and will be there till he’s drunk it through. You’ll have to be contented with Jock M'Winder—if he’ll go. But neither of you can push off from here till the weather eases.”

“Got to,” said Donald. “Bir eett’s very bad, and Isa says if he on our hands we’ll as likely as not lose the Perkinses as tenants for the shoot.” The shaggy red head of Jock M'Winder opened and shut noiselessly. Then it gave a gush of rather startling lamditer They stared at him. ° “Lord!” said Jock M'Winder. “I wonder. Is this Sir Fawcett of yours tlm engineer, Donald?” “No a doctor. It was him that straightened Mrs Perkins’s insides only last year. He was trying to climb our hill where the Picts live when he fell. He always said there were no Picts. It’s my belief the Piets pushed him over the’ locks, but as he’s never got back consciousness, he hasn’t told about that, 30

That looks like concussion. And a compound fracture of both the left lower downTr! Bo^ 0 " MllSt have coma down a tidy thump. Possibly there are other trifles that have escaped Mrs Fraser s diagnosis. The gent seems in a bad way Of course, I’ll go if you want me. But Rabbie, you’ll have to borrow me old Ciummes emergency case. From onm t r >ona r- SayS, - lt nia y me an a major operation Great joke amputating Fawcett Fosters left leg with the family neat saw- but I’m not tough enough to co 'Without an anaesthetic.” Donald !• jaser looked anxious. “ I wish we could get old Crumme along as well, however drunk he may be. Sir Fawcetts not a man to be fooled with. Hes a Wimpole street specialist, so General Perkins says, and quite the top man in his own line.” •’n ga i' n red ’ bea rded man cackled with laughter. “If you read the newspapers you d know that Fawcett Foster’s absolutely II m the gland line. He only had one competitor .and him he eliminated. Hes the top of his trade. Millionaires and other potentates bring their glands to him from Chicago, and Wigan d?rtv F rf C , athay ‘ And n ° W ’ gum, his irty life hangs on the whim of a septic fisherman. We’ll have to cross to Bentigula m my Loch Fyne boat, Donald, our rotten old tarred whaler would ,lp h » oush * he «» thls —

. The Western Ocean, when it feels so inclined, looses off the worst of its Hein- lie paSSl ° ns on the Scottish Outer Hebndes, and as the “Sailing Directions drily remark, “ Navigation is dangerous without local knowledge.” Io that profound statement, I mav add from personal experience of ‘those troubled waters that navigation is dangerous there for small craft a!wavs I’or the amateur the passage that day from Foil to Bentigula would have approached the terrific, and the two hard sailor-men were franklv aware that it was highly risky. “ j O ck M'Winder ” had been born in the Western Hebrides and had acquired sea-kr.owledge as a fisher lad before school, Aberdeen University, and other interludes had wasted his time. As a practising fisherman, his hand had soon got back its natural touch on tiller and sheet, and his eye had again begun to rove automatically for information to windward. Donald Fiasei, as I have said, was a blue-water man before he had signed on as a mate in the coasting trade. The Kelvin motor in the double-ended Loch Fyne boat was as usual out of action, and the passage between islands had to be made under sail. From anchorage to anchorage, I have just measured it on the chart. Allowing liberally for keeping out of “the grave yard, I make the distance 18 and a-half miles. Jock (with the sick man at the back of his mind) drove the boat, into the seas a good deal harder than the blue-water man thought safe Still the time for that 18 and a-half miles was 23 hours and a-quarter, and the pair of them were finely pickled bv the time they grounded the boat alongside Bentigula s stumpy quay, and tottered ashore.

“Gosh!” said Donald Fraser. “Me for a drink and a bed. I’d give a bit for a steamer s hot bath. Do you fishermen stop your dam lugs’l along'the yard, or leave it to slosh about in the bilge ? ”

Jock M'Winder climbed stiffly up over the string-piece of the granite quav. “ Snug her down as best you know, Tonal My job’s my patient. Get a good fug up in the cuddy for me to come back to. Hullo, here’s Isa, looking more like Cleopatra than ever. How do you do, Mrs Fraser, mm? And how’s the oatient? Fawcett Foster, no less, so Donald says, he is. Well, he’ll have to wait till I absorb about half a bottle of your parent’s terrific whisky to help me thaw that out. We’ve had a devil of a passage of it, Isa, across from Foil, with the Minch going allout for ugliness, and if it hadn’t 0 been for Donald’s being the two ends and the bight of a sailorman we should never have got here. If you’ve got such a trifle as a cold grouse or a cold dog up at the house one could put a knife and fork into I’d like it fine. You see we came away without a crumb of grub, and have put in a whole day and night over the passage.”

“ Sir Fawcett,” said Isabella Fraser, “is in a very bad way.” “ Oh, that brute can go to hades, so far as I am concerned,” Jock M'Winder admitted, “ at any rate till I am fuelled and provisioned. Get ’along with it, I say, Isa, or I won’t see you through your next babv.”

Jock M'Winder scrubbed his hands and most of the rest of himself with dog soap out of Andy MTntosh’s store, and covered his red hair and his red whiskers with a towel, and the rest

of himself in one of Isabella’s nightgowns before he operated. Indeed for a scaly outcast Hebridean fisherman he seemed to know very accurately how to dress the part of surgeon. The patient, when he came to Tiim, was muttering and bickering, but showed no signs of sense, and as there was not a professional amesthetist on the premises, Jock did not commandeer one of the amateur variety. Indeed, he turned everybody out of the low-roofed bedroom which made his operating theatre, even including the reluctant Brigadier-general Perkins, the Liverpool stockbroker, who had seen many wounds, and Mrs Isabella Fraser, who from assorted experiences as parlourmaid in Huntly Gardens and elsewhere in Glasgow, considered herself amongst other things to be quite the competent hospital sister. The redhaired Jock, when he scurried them out, seemed to have a very compelling way with him, almost, as Brigadier-general Perkins, the hardy stockbroker, said, as though he had been the real big doctor.

Jock Dl‘Winder of the fish-scales and the scarlet beard operated, prescribed, ate, drank, slept, and sailed away presumably for Foil in the double-ended Loch Fyne boat with the Kelvin motor which declined duty.

In due time the brain of Sir Fawcett Foster, that eminent consultant surgeon, recovered from the effects of the concussion. He heard of the smash of his leg, and talked technically about tibias and fibulas, and commented favourably on the skill with which his own compound fracture of these useful items of wearing apparel had been reduced. He also, with the help of Mrs Perkins’s hand mirror, approved of the stitches that had been put into the assorted cuts in his head and shoulder. He noticed a rope which had, by Jock’s instructions, been rigged to a ceiling beam above Tiis head to help him to turn over when necessary, but took no interest in it, though he admitted that Jock must be a kind-hearted man. He didn’t want to turn over. All he hankered after was the right to lie still and not be bothered.

But after a week of doing nothing, although the smashed left leg of Sir Fawcett Foster was still in its assorted fragments the grey matter inside his skull was beginning to show signs of activity. Mrs Perkins talked to him for an hour. The next day, besides taking a turn herself, she put on Mr Tom and Miss Jane Perkins to stand watches of an hour apiece. On the day after, though a courteous hostess, she gave up the watchkeeping idea, and handed the sufferer a hook on the local Hebridean countryside. It was called “ The Bruce Saga.” The author was one J.-DPWinder. The publisher was a small man Sir Fawcett had never heard of before, but he noted the statement on the title page:—Over 17,000 copies of this book have been sold.

This looked as though other people had found it readable—if the publisher spoke the truth. So Sir FSwcett put on his spectacles, and plodded through it himself.

He was not particularly edified with the unpleasant habits of the Clan Bruce. But somehow he was tremendously interested in some items of the book’s manufacture which he could not in the least define. He was no reader of books in a general way outside the printed matter which dealt directly with his glandular branch of the medical profession. But about this volume there was, as I say, something vaguely (as he put it) reminiscent of the touch of a vanished hand and the press of a pen which at any rate ought to be still.

For a week he puzzled over this point, plodding 'through the Saga three weary times, and easing over his weight by the rope that dangled from the low ceiling beam every time he wanted to turn in bed.

Then he got down to it—through one technical word in a long tedious sen-tence—anti-simian.

He looked at the dangling rope above, and understood why it had been tempting him more and more every day, and understood also that it had been hung there for the purpose of temptation, and nodded appreciatively as he admitted to himself the name of the hangsman. Then with a tentative hand he pulled away certain bandages round his middle, and felt for a certain scar in the small of his back. He found it.

“My anti-climbing gland gone. Alexander Kenyon Windermere and I are the only men who know where it is and what it does. I thought A. K. Windermere was eliminated. He isn’t. I am.”

It was some three weeks later that the Perkins family finished their shoot on Bentigula, and took south with them in the R.M.S. Chandelier (280 tons) that eminent gland specialist, Sir Fawcett Foster, and decanted him into the mental nursing home which lies inland from Oban, where he now resides. They reported the circumstance later on to the magnificent Isa, at the same time taking her island shoot for the next year. “ That bone-setter fellow,” wrote General Perkins, “so the doctors say, did his job on Sir Fawcett with extraordinary skill. Old Dr Cramme himself couldn’t have set the leg better. The poor man’s trouble is he’s always trying to climb something. His case is’unique, and the medicos find it vastly interesting, but quite incurable. There is no blame due to Jock. The trouble comes from the bump on the head, which may be due to the fall from the cliffs, as I think, or to a thump from your Picts, as you say. Anyway, that red-whiskered quack was

a very gallant fellow to come over from Foil with Donald through the terrific sea, and I enclose my cheque for £2O for Donald for his trouble in the matter, and 19gns for the red-headed Jock by way of bearing witness that I take him for a'professional man, and not a whiskered, loafing, scaly-jerseyed West fisherman, which is what he looked like. “ But I suppose poor Jock will let that old pirate Rabbie Bruce soak the guineas out of him in the usual damp and pleasant way.”