Life of Dr. John Reid / by George Wilson.

  • George Wilson
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life of Dr. John Reid / by George Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    42/262 page 30
    . 30 LIFE OF 4 Old Surgeons’ Hall School of Anatomy, was what is techni- cally named Demonstrator of Anatomy. The duty of this teacher is to preside all day over the dissecting-room, where the students prosecute the dissection of the human body. A single body is allotted to ten students, and in a large dis- secting-room there may be twelve, or more, such parties at work at once. The scene is one from which most who: witness it for the first time shrink with horror, and to which some never can, by any effort, reconcile themselves. As those, however, who are in this latter case, cannot possibly prosecute medicine, the haunters of the dissecting-room are students who have become accustomed to all its loathsome- ness and horrors, and whom conscientious devotion to study, relish for the science of anatomy, conviction that there is no other road to honest practice and professional eminence, dread of examination, or mere familiarity and indifference, have more or less completely reconciled to the unnatural atmosphere which they breathe. It is wonderful, indeed, how soon busy men grow indifferent to what seem, to unoccu- pied onlookers and idlers, intolerable or hazardous conditions. The coolest of all men in a formidable operation, is not unseldom the surgeon whose hand is at work. The least alarmed among the passengers of a swift railway train, is the engine-driver, who will suffer first and worst if any calamity occurs. Soldiers encamped on the battle-field long for the bugle-call which will exchange suspense and inaction for hand- to-hand fight, and garments rolled in blood. The coal-miner, bent only on hewing his day’s work of coal, uncovers his safety-lamp, and perils his own life and that of hundreds. The chemist, engrossed with research in his laboratory, declares that the most noisome of gases, which to him is dear as the memento of important labours, has a most pleasant smell. We shall not wonder, therefore, that Dr Reid spent the whole day happily in what a Sanitary Com- missioner would have justly called a crowded, ill-ventilated, pestilential charnel-house.
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