








ROUND THE RED LAMP

BEING FACTS AND FANCIES OF MEDICAL LIFE

By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE




THE PREFACE.

[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend
in America.]

I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a
woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to
treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism.
If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to
make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite
essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which
is principally presented to the surgeon or physician.  He sees many
beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and
self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities
are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial.  One cannot write
of medical life and be merry over it.

Then why write of it, you may ask?  If a subject is painful why treat
it at all?  I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat
painful things as well as cheerful ones.  The story which wiles away a
weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold,
than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life.  A tale
which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and
shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic
in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result.  There are
a few stories in this little collection which might have such an
effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved
them from serial publication.  In book-form the reader can see that
they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid
them.

Yours very truly,

A. CONAN DOYLE.


P. S.--You ask about the Red Lamp.  It is the usual sign of the general
practitioner in England.




CONTENTS.

  BEHIND THE TIMES
  HIS FIRST OPERATION
  A STRAGGLER OF '15
  THE THIRD GENERATION
  A FALSE START
  THE CURSE OF EVE
  SWEETHEARTS
  A PHYSIOLOGIST'S WIFE
  THE CASE OF LADY SANNOX
  A QUESTION OF DIPLOMACY
  A MEDICAL DOCUMENT
  LOT NO. 249
  THE LOS AMIGOS FIASCO
  THE DOCTORS OF HOYLAND
  THE SURGEON TALKS




ROUND THE RED LAMP.




BEHIND THE TIMES.

My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic
circumstances.  It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an
old country house.  I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and
knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female
accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me
into a warm bath.  I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be
present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with
my lungs.  I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had
other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is
far from flattering.  A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very
bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards--those are the main
items which he can remember.

From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical
assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me.  He vaccinated me; he cut me
for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps.  It was a world of peace and
he the one dark cloud that threatened.  But at last there came a time
of real illness--a time when I lay for months together inside my
wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard
face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal
very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a
whisper when it spoke to a sick child.

And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the
same as ever.  I can see no change since first I can remember him, save
that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge
shoulders a little more bowed.  He is a very tall man, though he loses
a couple of inches from his stoop.  That big back of his has curved
itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape.  His face is of a
walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads,
with the wind and the rain in his teeth