The Citadel by A. J. Cronin Read Free Book Online

under discussion was money. Andrew judged that Blodwen had a good deal of it invested in sound stocks and that under the admirable direction of Aneurin Rees she was from time to time shrewdly increasing their holdings. Money, at this period, held no significance for Andrew. It was enough that he was regularly paying off his obligation to the Endowment. He had a few shillings in his pocket for cigarettes. Beyond that he had his work.
    Now, more than ever, he appreciated how much his clinical work meant to him. It existed, the knowledge, as a warm ever-present inner consciousness which was like a fire at which he warmed himself when he was tired, depressed, perplexed. Lately, indeed, even stranger perplexities had formed and were moving more strongly than before with him. Medically, he had begun to think for himself. Perhaps Denny, with his radical destructive outlook, was mainly responsible for this. Denny’s codex was literally the opposite of everything which Manson had been taught. Condensed and framed, it might well have hung, text-like, above his bed: ‘I do not believe.’
    Turned out to pattern by his medical school, Manson had faced the future with a well-bound text-book confidence. He had acquired a smattering of physics, chemistry and biology – at least he had slit up and studied the earthworm. Thereafter he had been dogmatically fed upon the accepted doctrines. He knew all the diseases, with their tabulated symptoms, and the remedies thereof. Take gout, for instance. You could cure it with colchicum. He could still see Professor Lamplough blandly purring to his class, ‘Vinum Colchici, gentlemen, twenty to thirty minim doses, an absolute specific in gout.’ But was it? – that was the question he now asked himself. A month ago he had tried colchicum, pushing it to the limit in a genuine case of ‘poor man’s’ gout – a severe and painful case. The result had been dismal failure.
    And what about half, three-quarters of the other ‘remedies’ in the pharmacopoeia? This time he heard the voice of Doctor Eliot, lecturer on Materia Medica. ‘And now, gentlemen, we pass to elemi – a concrete resinous exudation, the botanical source of which is undetermined, but is probably Canarium commune, chiefly imported from Manilla, employed in ointment form, one in five, an admirable stimulant and disinfectant to sores and issues.’
    Rubbish! Yes, absolute rubbish. He knew that now. Had Eliot ever tried unguentum elemi? He was convinced that Eliot had not. All of that erudite information came out of a book and that, in its turn, came out of another book and so on, right back, probably to the Middle Ages. The word ‘issues,’ now dead as mutton, confirmed this view.
    Denny had sneered at him, that first night, for naïvely compounding a bottle of medicine: Denny always sneered at the medicine compounders, the medicine swillers, Denny held that only half a dozen drugs were any use, the rest he cynically classed as ‘muck’. It was something, that view of Denny’s, to wrestle with in the night, a shattering thought, the ramifications of which Andrew could as yet only vaguely comprehend.
    At this point in his reflections he arrived at Riskin Street and entered No 3. Here he found the patient to be a small boy of nine years of age, named Joey Howells, who was exhibiting a mild, seasonal attack of measles. The case was of little consequence, yet because of the circumstances of the household, which was a poor one, it promised inconvenience to Joey’s mother. Howells himself, a day labourer at the quarries, had been laid up three months with pleurisy, for which no compensation was payable, and now Mrs Howells, a delicate woman, already run off her feet attending to one invalid, in addition to her work of cleaning Bethesda Chapel, was called upon to make provision for another.
    At the end of his visit as Andrew stood talking to her at the door of her house, he remarked with regret:
    ‘You have your hands full. It’s