The Physic Garden

by Catherine Czerkawska

  So many hours in Jenny’s company had only served to reinforce my preferences. She had a hundred remedies, most of them distilled from the contents of her garden, and she had instructed me in their use. In fact, some of them had been put to very good use indeed for our Rab. I would almost go so far as to say that they had been instrumental in his survival: the poultices and the potions she and Thomas brought for him, the medicines that seemed to loosen the tightness in his chest and bring his fever down. He would never be robust, but we had great hopes of our move to the country, great hopes that the fresh air and good food would finish the work that Jenny’s and Thomas’s medications had begun.

  Over the years, we had indulged in many friendly debates, Thomas and I, about the possibility of repairing the human body as one might fix some complicated machine, as Jenny’s father repaired his loom, making parts for it, oiling this or that component, carefully watching the way it worked and making sure that all was in good order. Thomas believed that, in time, this would be possible for the human body as well. But, so he said, the medical men had to know what went on beneath the skin, how all these processes worked.

  I found myself acknowledging the truth of it. I can still acknowledge it now, when such things have become fairly commonplace, but there was something in me that shrank from it all the same. It seemed to discount something else, something vital. Lord knows I have never been a passionately religious man. I had gone to the kirk on the Sabbath, right enough, because I had no choice but to sit shivering and yawning through interminable sermons. My daughter-in-law would still have me go and threatens now and again to set the holy beagles on me, but I plead the infirmities of old age, my rheumatism which prevents me from attending. To tell you the truth, I am but rheumatic north north west as the melancholy Dane might have put it, but the excuse serves me well enough.

  It has aye struck me that God, if he exists, has done me and mine few favours. My successes have mostly been earned by the diligent work of hands and mind together. But all the same, whenever Thomas and I were discussing these things, I could not help but think that perhaps in examining the processes which animated the human frame, the surgeons failed to realise – or perhaps too easily forgot – that there was something else, some spirit that enlivened and illuminated this piece of walking, talking meat.

  I suppose that was one reason why Thomas had almost persuaded me that dissection was permissible, if only as a means to a desirable end. He never failed to remind me that he too believed in the existence of that same spirit. He had told me one or two stories about the value of surgery, without ever going into any of the more gruesome details, but he always stressed his own belief that some synthesis of the two, surgery and physic, might be advisable, that perhaps surgery should be attempted only where physic had failed.

  For myself, I could not look impartially on these things, could not see the blood and bones without thinking of all the other things that made up a man or woman, the hopes and dreams and fears that constituted the experience of each of them, the friendships, the affections and enmities. When Thomas talked of this or that cadaver, I could think only that it had once been a living, breathing person who ate and drank, who walked and slept, who kissed and danced and wept and perhaps dreamed of a better life. Could not even these, the lowest among the low, once have had hopes for a better life? And were they not, each man or woman, and no matter how abased at the end, still unique in the world, and different from all others? But Thomas told me that he agreed with me in all particulars save one. You must remember that I was young and reasonably unfamiliar with the sight of death at close quarters. To be sure, I had observed the deaths of my father and my baby sister, but that was all. It strikes me that Thomas had sat at many a bedside to see the soul slipping away from the body, as I myself have done since. Oh, it never becomes commonplace. Familiarity does not breed contempt. But you grow accustomed to such things and doctors sooner than most.

  ‘The difference between life and death is profound,’ he would say. ‘It is one thing to respect the remains because of what they were in life. To give those remains a decent burial wherever possible. But the body, the cadaver, is a shell. The spirit no longer has need of it. And that being the case, why should we not investigate its inner workings, if it may help others to survive and thrive, like your Rab and so many others? Who knows when poor souls like him may have need of treatment while they are yet in life? Isn’t that true, William?’

  I could not disagree with him.

  And so it was that when he came to the garden on that chilly afternoon – a clear, cool day it was – and carried me off with him to Professor Jeffray’s dissecting rooms, to see the chain saw in use, I went with him. All reluctantly, but I went with him. I had never yet been to view a dissection, although he had tried to persuade me from time to time. ‘You will see if you come, William, that it is by no means so dreadful as you believe it to be. We should all face our fears. And then they will lose the power to harm us. Besides, I have a great wish that you should see the chain saw. It is a very fine and humane invention.’

  He thought it might very well, in modified form, be of some use in the Ayrshire gardens where he expected me soon to be working, but his real interest lay in its potential to ease the suffering of patients that might become so acute that they died under the blade, especially those wounded in war.

  ‘I am told that Jeffray intends to use it today. I have his express permission to attend and bring you with me. It will be a popular event. If the saw can cut through bone, then it can cut through green wood as well.’

  ‘But you could have told me all this without taking me along to see it for myself!’

  ‘You can have one peep at it, Thomas, and then, if the whole process still revolts you, I promise you that you can be out of the viewing gallery faster than you can say knife.’

  He could see that I was wavering, as I invariably did when he set his mind to persuade me of something.

  ‘Come. We shall both lurk near the back, and then you can go and I can stay, as we both please. But I would certainly like you to see this machine, because I feel it has very many uses other than the rather grisly reason for its invention!’

  The professor had indeed designed the chain saw (one of two such saws which were invented at precisely the same time in the later years of the last century) with a very specific kind of operation in mind, but when Thomas had told me about it, I had thought how useful it might be to have such an instrument, in order to trim awkward branches or clear persistent undergrowth.

  Many years after the events I now relate, I came across Jeffray’s own account of his invention and a fascinating document it was too, although even reading it at that distance in time set my teeth on edge somewhat.

  ‘I had an opportunity,’ Jeffray wrote, about a particular amputation that he must have been observing, ‘of seeing an attempt made to cut out a piece that was diseased, near the middle of the thigh bone. To do that with the common saw was next to impossible. A saw, therefore, was prepared, of a different kind, to rasp the bone across, without hurting the flesh; but the difficulty that attended the execution of this operation, the time spent in performing it, and the pain which, notwithstanding all the care that was taken, the patient seemed to suffer, made such an impression on me, that I could not rest from thinking of some method by which bones might be cut out more easily.’

  When I read that, I think I revised some of my ideas about the professor. While the very idea of cutting out bones with ease from the living flesh still revolted me, his intentions seemed wholly admirable. He wished to alleviate the suffering of his patients and so he made a drawing of a chain saw that he thought might be useful in speeding up the whole process. As soon as he could afford the venture, when he was first appointed to the chair of Anatomy and Botany, he had a specimen of his design manufactured by a London jeweller and it was this instrument he wished to demonstrate in Glasgow. I have pondered long and hard about this over the years. Did Thomas want only to sh
ow me the new saw? Did he want to take my mind off my own troubles for an hour or two? Was it some failure of his imagination? And then I ask myself, was there some less straightforward motive? Did he still remember what he thought of as my over-reaction to the Hunter book, the book with those distressing illustrations that I had found in his library? We had agreed to disagree about it and move on, which is what I sincerely believed we had done. But now, looking back on it, I wonder if it rankled with him just a little, wounded his intellectual pride, that his friend with whom he was in such concordance about all else, still, to some small extent, disagreed with him upon this one matter, a matter, moreover, about which he was confident that he was right. But I see that I must give him the benefit of the doubt and perhaps he simply wanted to persuade me once and for all of the gravity and value of surgery. I cannot fault him for that. He believed in it. Perhaps he thought that I would be persuaded and then we would be in agreement on this, as in so much else.

  If so, he over-reached himself. Whatever goddess watches over such things, Nemesis herself, perhaps, gazed sternly down at him, smiled her thin smile, and pointed her finger directly at him. Never in a million years could he have foreseen the consequences of his decision to carry me off to the professor’s dissecting rooms in College Street on that cool winter’s day.

  These dissecting rooms, by the by, had long assumed a kind of notoriety in the mind of the public, the mob, I suppose you would call them. The unpredictable masses, composed of men and women very like myself, were as suspicious of them as I was, more so perhaps. On various occasions then, and in the future, the superintendent and a number of tall mounted police officers, with their swords much in evidence, had to be called into attendance to prevent the common folk of the town from entering the dissecting rooms and destroying them and everything contained in them. There was a certain amount of horrified censure expressed in the drawing rooms of the gentry about all this, but I had a deal of sympathy with the general outrage. It was a popular superstition – and I think remains so to this day – that the sawbones, as the surgeons were called, would seek live victims for their dissections and that there were many unscrupulous people who were in their pay and who would look for helpless victims, those poor souls who could be entrapped, carried off and dispatched, and all for the convenience of some distinguished professor of surgery and his rabble of students.

  Bodysnatching was widespread and, worse than that, murder has certainly happened since then in Edinburgh, with the case of the notorious Burke and Hare. When bodies were in short supply, the pair seemingly decided to take things a step further and manufacture the goods themselves. I suspect it may also have happened more than once in Glasgow, although there is no proof of such a crime occurring here, and I would certainly never go so far as to accuse Jeffray of such a thing. But it is on record that the resurrection men would cast their net very wide, travelling out to remote Ayrshire villages where folk might be less cautious and more trusting than in the town.

  I think at heart Jeffray was an honourable man, according to his own beliefs, if a trifle over-enthusiastic in the pursuit of knowledge. But then, what good scholar is not over-enthusiastic in this way? What good gardener too? Or bookseller for that matter? So as you see, time has mellowed me, save in one particular only. But that single thing I could not forgive. It was not Jeffray’s fault. But I must needs lay the blame somewhere, and I was not at fault either. I run ahead of myself only because I cannot bear to think about what happened next. But I see that I must. And so I can only tell it plainly and baldly as it happened, neither seeking to embellish it with spurious emotions, nor reducing it to less than the horror it undoubtedly was.

  * * *

  The dissecting rooms were wicked cold. The stone itself seemed to exude a chill that had nothing fresh about it, but more the quality of a subterranean cavern where the air had lain stale for many years. There were no fires to lighten the atmosphere, for the cadavers demanded cold conditions for their preservation if they were not to stink to high heaven with the stench of their own corruption. There were the surgeons, the professor and his assistant, all in their long aprons that reminded me oddly of the aprons we gardeners wore, but smeared with the rusty brown of dried blood, rather than the deep brown of dried earth. There was the smell of blood in the air. I remember that. A faint, sickly scent of blood, like a flesher’s shop.

  The gallery was full, mostly of students, a rowdy crowd and much inclined to jeer, although the professor quelled them with a glance. I saw that Thomas’s presence helped to quieten them, because most of them attended his lectures and he was as popular as ever. There were, besides, various gentlemen of the town for whom this was something of an event, a rite of passage into adulthood. If you could watch a dissection without swooning like a woman, then you were a man indeed. It had become a popular pastime, like going to see a play I suppose, but more masculine and robust than such feminine pretences.

  The body lay ready on the slab, covered with a sheet. It looked rather small and insignificant to be sure, with the linen bunched and heaped over it, but a wee thing sinister as well, as though the vivid imagination might detect movement there among the mounds and folds of creased linen. In spite of the cold, there was another faint smell in the air over and above the smell of blood, and I knew that it was the odour of putrefaction, which was already setting in. The body must be some few days old. I was trying to avoid looking in that direction again, but Thomas nudged me, and I saw that Professor Jeffray was holding up the saw, which was what Thomas had wanted me to see, a hand saw with a finely serrated link chain. The professor was explaining how the instrument could be very useful for a process called symphysiotomy and that was what he was going to be demonstrating today.

  ‘Symphysi – what?’ I whispered to Thomas and he looked at me, frowning for a moment, nonplussed in a way that I had never seen him before.

  ‘It is used to increase the size of the pelvis. When a woman is having great difficulty in childbirth. Such things can be life threatening. But I think there is a process of dividing the ligaments of what is called the symphysis – down there – which will allow the child to be born more or less naturally.’

  ‘But would such a process not be fatal to the mother?’

  ‘No. Not fatal. Not always. It is painful. But it is less dangerous to the mother than a full caesarean from which many women die, even though the child may be saved. So it is deemed to be a useful procedure, although I’ll allow it can have unpleasant after-effects.’

  ‘What kind of after-effects?’

  ‘Some women have extreme difficulty walking afterwards.’

  ‘Dear God!’

  ‘But anything that helps to alleviate the dangers of childbirth is useful.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘William, I had no idea that Jeffray was demonstrating this procedure today. I thought it was an amputation merely! Perhaps you should go now.’

  I could see that he was mortified, although trying hard to disguise it. I think he would not have brought me had he known.

  I decided to spare his feelings. And in truth, I was very reluctant to stay.

  ‘Well,’ I told him. ‘Now I have seen your chain saw and admired it, albeit from a safe distance, I think I shall take myself off back to my garden!’ I spoke with a determined attempt at light-heartedness. ‘And you are right. There may be uses for it in the garden, but it would need to be a much more robust instrument altogether and not such a delicate thing, although I can see that it might be of some value for pruning small specimen trees.’

  Even as I said that I turned back to glance at the instrument in question, only to see the professor’s assistant pull the sheet from the stone table with its gruesome burden, like a sacrifice to some heathen deity.

  Flax. Spun flax. Dirty withall, like flax that has lain in a muddy pool. A fountain of fair hair, falling around a pale face, so pale that it had a greenish tinge, like a fish left too long on the slab. It seemed as though the men who had pl
aced the body there could not resist arranging the hair. It seemed to have taken into itself all the life that had fled from its possessor. It was the hair I recognised but I could not help myself. I stared at the body, long enough for my eyes to travel downwards over the breasts, the swollen belly, the slender legs, and back to the face. Then one of the students standing behind me let out a little whoop and a whistle. ‘Sonsie!’ he said, with morbid appreciation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Afterwards

  I turned towards the student who had whistled. I would have struck him, given the chance. God knows what my face must have told him, because he recoiled in horror and my blow missed him. I grasped him by the shoulders and thrust him aside, bruising him I’m sure, and then I was running down the stairs and out into the street, gasping for the town air that suddenly seemed blessedly cool and clean and fresh, heaving as though I would never fill my lungs with enough of it. I was coughing and gasping, striving to shift the stench of mortality that filled my nostrils at the sight of my darling Jenny, lying on that slab, stone cold and naked, exposed for all to see.

  It was a sight that I would never ever be rid of again.

  I could feel the tears starting in my eyes and the revulsion that rose from my stomach into my throat and made me want to vomit. But no sooner did I get command of myself with some monumental effort than I was aware of Thomas beside me. He too was weeping, sobbing and choking. Indeed he was so unlike himself that in the middle of my own horror, I found myself wondering if he might be having a seizure.

  ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ he kept saying.

  It was true then, and not some terrible figment of my imagination. It had been Jenny, there on the slab, my Jenny, with the child still inside her, Jenny upon whom the professor had been about to demonstrate his brutal procedure, slitting her open, for the edification of a group of careless students and the entertainment of a handful of men about town.