A great day for the doctors / [Charles Dickens].

  • Charles Dickens
Date:
[1851]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A great day for the doctors / [Charles Dickens]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Charles Dickens.J / —not when tliere is a rough sea, but when all is solemn and calm. After a time, I left the church ; and nc^t being inclined to return home, and finding that all the music from the public-houses, and all the eating, and the dancing, were very inharmonious to my then state of mind, I wandered on towards the plain, and feasted my eyes on a view of the Alps, which to-day seemed fairly to have stalked towards Munich, so near did they seem,—of a tender, quiet, blue- grey, but their forms gigantic, stern, Alpine ! A “ CELESTIAL ” COFFEE-HOUSE. Another evening, after a day of real hard work, when we were in a particularly cheerful mood, I suggested to my companion that, as all was so sunny and delicious, we would drink our coffee in a picturesque old orchard, which I had discovered in one of my exploratory expeditions through the suburb of St. Anna. It is a pretty walk this, through the suburb to the coffee-house orchard, which joins the English garden. You cross first the corner of a very large field, acres and acres of which are covered with huge heaps of timber—enor- mous pines, which have been floated down from the Alps. The tall trees of the English garden form a back-ground to the field ; and then passing orchards, and cottages, and country houses, you arrive at the coffee-house, a bright white house, with a deal of pale sea- green paint about it, standing high, approached by a flight of steps, and having a kind of a Russian look. The orchard in which it stands, is a grand old orchard, full of old apple-trees, under which are some hundreds of seats. On the former occasions when I passed it, there must have been many hundred people drink- ing cofiee there. On this evening, however, all was deserted,—so much so, in fact, that there was no coffee to be had. After resting, therefore, a few minutes under an apple-tree, we proceeded on our way, when, turning into the English Garden, behold! another coffee- house, a very small one peeping out from under the trees. “ Coffee and Wine-house of the Kingdom of Heaven ” {Zum Hifnmel-nick) was painted on an arched sign over the gate. So extraordinary an appellation could not be disregarded, however contrary to our English notions. _ “ Let us try how coffee tastes in the King- dom of Heaven,” said I; and in we went. The Kingdom of Heaven, however, was also apparently deserted, except by a pair of lovers, —a young girl in a white dress, and a student in a scarlet cap and black velvet coat, and by a picturesque group of old peasants, men and women, who sat on a bench before the door, and drank beer ; the student also drank beer, '—the girl took nothing; she sat with her back turned towards him, and evidently looked very unhappy. I think they had just had a quarrel; what a shame to quarrel in the Kingdom of Heaven ! I went into the house, and ordered coffee from a woman whom I met with a huge coffee- mill in her hand. She said it should be ready in a minute, capital fresh coffee ! So we seated ourselves at the end oi a long verandah, which-w.as. covered with , where the lovers vines, at the end q were, and notice, time till the co^^q^^GjiTed. Coffee a,t length made its appearance,—'sfile Cofiee an^.peppery bread ; and leav/ng th^; lovers still unrecon- ciled, we bacfe j adieu to- the'^“ Kingdom' of Heaven,” and , Detook«i^rselves home ih-the delicious twilight. 24 ■| A GREAT DA-KjqBJEHE D0'GT|iRS. The first of %ctobp^4a-a great ^.d'ay for the doctors. The s^T^man may look out for the same time, because thM pheasant shoot- ing begins; the farmer, because it suggests certain arrangements between malt and hops preliminary to Christmas and the comforts of long winter nights ; the lawyer may take October the first as a hint of the gradual death of the long vacation, and the near advent of Term time and November the second—its writs and summonses, judgments and executions ; the draper may regard it shrewdly, as affording a good time for a “ frightful sacrifice,” and an “ extensive sale of autumn goods, preparatory to the com- mencement of the winter season.” Each and all of these, and many more may have an interest in the first of October; but their claims are as nothing to that of the doctors. To the medical folks of these three kingdoms —but to those of London more pre-eminently —does the day especially belong. To them, it is the opening of a new year—^the commence- ment of a new activity. On that day the great majority of them commenced their career as students: from that they date the years of preliminary reading, and lecturing, and hospital “ walking,” to be gone through be- fore the terrible day of examination. Scat- tered over the globe they may be—and they are so scattered, much more than the men of other professions, the Navy alone excepted— yet the first of October always remains a sort of red-letter day in the mind of the Medicos. It is a time suggestive of old thoughts and companions, old pranks, and old stories. Such feelings bring most of those who are within reach to the old scenes on the first of October ; and hence, on that day, there is at the London medical schools an assemblage of doctors in all stages of growth—from the raw country student in green coat and highlows, to the staid hospital professor in black scholastic gown, through all the intermediate niceties of fast students and slow students, reading students with specs and note-books, and smoking-students with cigar-cases and im- perials ; the matter-of-fact workeys of the Borough, and the gentlemanly idlers of St. George’s ; the country doctor up for the day by rail; the suburban practitioner, who with
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