Reluctant sinners / by Sidney Fairway.

  • Fairway, Sidney, 1879-1947.
Date:
1934
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reluctant sinners / by Sidney Fairway. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    114/324 (page 114)
    Everything depends upon his ability to face any emergency with coolness, courage and promptitude, but none can share his responsibility. Daily he plays his cards with life at stake and death but an inch away. He is human, subject to physical ailments and mental depression, but his work must never suffer. Behind the mask he must clench his teeth and carry on to the end. Little does the world know of such things, for, even outside the operating theatre, the surgeon wears a mask. Sometimes it is cold and formal ; occasionally, cynical and overbearing ; sometimes, genial or lackadaisical. But always there must be behind it the power to inspire confidence. Sylvia had seen her surgeon once or twice before the operation ; afterwards, she saw him more often and always with a feeling that ‘failure’ was a word which he had deliberately expunged from his vocabulary. Marable, too, came to see her often, always in a hurry, always full of enthusiasm, always terribly alive. He would burst into her room, uncere¬ moniously, with a rapid fire of questions from the machine gun of his brain. How was she? How was the pain ? How did she sleep ? And a string of even more intimate inquiries. The answers were always somewhere . . . on a chart, in a test tube, in Sister’s head. He gathered them up in heaps, sorted them, arranged them, interpreted them in terms of medicine and rushed from the room before Sylvia had time to express her gratitude. Sometimes he had a class of students with him : then he stayed longer. One day he showed them her legs. “Quite straight,” he pointed out. “Far too nice to be twisted by a Bolshevistic gland. Here’s the fellow.” He held up a bottle in which was an object like a small walnut. “Fons lacrymarum—but, of course, you fellows don’t learn Latin nowadays ; it can’t do any more harm anyhow ; we’ll stick it in the museum.