SIR PATRICK Well, young chap. Is your hat too small for you, eh?
RIDGEON Much too small. I owe it all to you.
SIR PATRICK Blarney, my boy. Thank you all the same. [He sits in one of the arm-chairs near the fireplace. RIDGEON sits on the couch]. Ive come to talk to you a bit. [To REDPENNY] Young man: get out.
REDPENNY Certainly, Sir Patrick [He collects his papers and makes for the door].
SIR PATRICK Thank you. Thats a good lad. [REDPENNY vanishes ]. They all put up with me, these young chaps, because I’m an old man, a real old man, not like you.Youre only beginning to give yourself the airs of age. Did you ever see a boy cultivating a moustache? Well, a middle-aged doctor cultivating a grey head is much the same sort of spectacle.
RIDGEON Good Lord! yes: I suppose so. And I thought that the days of my vanity were past. Tell me: at what age does a man leave off being a fool?
SIR PATRICK Remember the Frenchman who asked his grandmother at what age we get free from the temptations of love. The old woman said she didnt know. [RIDGEON laughs]. Well, I make you the same answer. But the world’s growing very interesting to me now, Colly.
RIDGEON You keep up your interest in science, do you?
SIR PATRICK Lord! yes. Modern science is a wonderful thing. Look at your great discovery! Look at all the great discoveries! Where are they leading to? Why, right back to my poor dear old father’s ideas and discoveries. He’s been dead now over forty years. Oh, it’s very interesting.
RIDGEON Well, theres nothing like progress, is there?
SIR PATRICK Dont misunderstand me, my boy. I’m not belittling your discovery. Most discoveries are made regularly every fifteen years; and it’s fully a hundred and fifty since yours was made last. Thats something to be proud of. But your discovery’s not new. It’s only inoculation. My father practised inoculation until it was made criminal in eighteen-forty. That broke the poor old man’s heart, Colly: he died of it. And now it turns out that my father was right after all. Youve brought us back to inoculation.
RIDGEON I know nothing about smallpox. My line is tuberculosis and typhoid and plague. But of course the principle of all vaccines is the same.
SIR PATRICK Tuberculosis? M-m-m-m!Youve found out how to cure consumption, eh?
RIDGEON I believe so.
SIR PATRICK Ah yes. It’s very interesting. What is it the old cardinal says in Browning’s play? “I have known four and twenty leaders of revolt.”6 Well, Ive known over thirty men that found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment, I suppose. There was my father’s old friend George Boddington of Sutton Coldfield. He discovered the open-air cure in eighteen-forty. He was ruined and driven out of his practice for only opening the windows; and now we wont let a consumptive patient have as much as a roof over his head. Oh, it’s very very interesting to an old man.
RIDGEON You old cynic, you dont believe a bit in my discovery.
SIR PATRICK No, no: I dont go quite so far as that, Colly. But still, you remember Jane Marsh?
RIDGEON Jane Marsh? No.
SIR PATRICK You dont!
RIDGEON No.
SIR PATRICK You mean to tell me you dont remember the woman with the tuberculosus ulcer on her arm?
RIDGEON [enlightened] Oh, your washerwoman’s daughter. Was her name Jane Marsh? I forgot.
SIR PATRICK Perhaps youve forgotten also that you undertook to cure her with Koch’s tuberculin.
RIDGEON And instead of curing her, it rotted her arm right off. Yes: I remember. Poor Jane! However, she makes a good living out of that arm now by shewing it at medical lectures.
SIR PATRICK Still, that wasnt quite what you intended, was it?
RIDGEON I took my chance of it.
SIR PATRICK Jane did, you mean.
RIDGEON Well, it’s always the patient who has to take the chance when an experiment is necessary. And we can find out nothing without experiment.
SIR PATRICK What did you find out from Jane’s case?
RIDGEON I found out that the inoculation that ought to cure sometimes kills.
SIR PATRICK I could have told you that. Ive tried these modern inoculations a bit myself. Ive killed people with them; and Ive cured people with them; but I gave them up because I never could tell which I was going to do.
RIDGEON [taking a pamphlet from a drawer in the writing-table and handing it to him] Read that the next time you have an hour to spare; and youll find out why.
SIR PATRICK [grumbling and fumbling for his spectacles] Oh, bother your pamphlets. Whats the practice of it? [Lookins at the pamphlet] Opsonin? What the devil is opsonin?
RIDGEON Opsonin is what you butter the disease germs with to make your white blood corpuscles eat them. [He sits down again on the couch].
SIR PATRICK Thats not new. Ive heard this notion that the white corpuscles—what is it that whats his name?—Metchnikoff—calls them?
RIDGEON Phagocytes.
SIRPATRICK Aye, phagocytes: yes, yes, yes. Well, I heard this theory that the phagocytes eat up the disease germs years ago: long before you came into fashion. Besides, they dont always eat them.
RIDGEON They do when you butter them with opsonin.
SIR PATRICK Gammon.es
RIDGEON No: it’s not gammon. What it comes to in practice is this. The phagocytes wont eat the microbes unless the microbes are nicely buttered for them. Well, the patient manufactures the butter for himself all right; but my discovery is that the manufacture of that butter, which I call opsonin, goes on in the system by ups and downs—Nature being always rhythmical, you know—and that what the inoculation does is to stimulate the ups or downs, as the case may be. If we had inoculated Jane Marsh when her butter factory was on the up-grade, we should have cured her arm. But we got in on the down-grade and lost her arm for her. I call the up-grade the positive phase and the down-grade the negative phase. Everything depends on your inoculating at the right moment. Inoculate when the patient is in the negative phase and you kill: inoculate when the patient is in the positive phase and you cure.
SIR PATRICK And pray how are you to know whether the patient is in the positive or the negative phase?
RIDGEON Send a drop of the patient’s blood to the laboratory at St. Anne’s; and in fifteen minutes I’ll give you his opsonin index in figures. If the figure is one, inoculate and cure: if it’s under point eight, inoculate and kill. Thats my discovery: the most important that has been made since Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. My tuberculosis patients dont die now.
SIR PATRICK And mine do when my inoculation catches them in the negative phase, as you call it. Eh?
RIDGEON Precisely. To inject a vaccine into a patient without first testing his opsonin is as near murder as a respectable practitioner can get. If I wanted to kill a man I should kill him that way.
EMMY [looking in] Will you see a lady that wants her husband’s lungs cured?
RIDGEON [impatiently] No. Havnt I told you I will see nobody? [To SIR PATRICK] I live in a state of siege ever since it got about that I’m a magician who can cure consumption with a drop of serum. [To EMMY] Dont come to me again about people who have no appointments. I tell you I can see nobody.
EMMY Well, I’ll tell her to wait a bit.
RIDGEON [furious] Youll tell her I cant see her, and send her away: do you hear?
EMMY [unmoved] Well, will you see Mr Cutler Walpole? He dont want a cure: he only wants to congratulate you.
RIDGEON Of course. Shew him up. [She turns to go]. Stop. [To SIR PATRICK] I want two minutes more with you between ourselves. [To EMMY] Emmy: ask Mr Walpole to wait just two minutes, while I finish a consultation.
EMMY Oh, he’ll wait all right. He’s talking to the poor lady. [She goes out].
SIR PATRICK Well? what is it?
RIDGEON Dont laugh at me. I want your advice.
SIR PATRICK Professional advice?
RIDGEON Yes. Theres something the matter with me. I dont know what it is.
SIR PATRICK Neither do I. I suppose youve been sounded.
RIDGEON Yes, of course. Theres nothing wrong with any of the organs: nothing special, anyhow. But I have a curious aching: I dont know where: I cant localize it. Sometimes I think it’s my heart: sometimes I suspect my spine. It doesnt exactly hurt me; but it unsettles me completely. I feel that something is going to happen. And there are other symptoms. Scraps of tunes come into my head that seem to me very pretty, though theyre quite commonplace.
SIR PATRICK Do you hear voices?
RIDGEON No.
SIR PATRICK I’m glad of that. When my patients tell me that theyve made a greater discovery than Harvey, and that they hear voices, I lock them up.
RIDGEON You think I’m mad! Thats just the suspicion that has come across me once or twice. Tell me the truth: I can bear it.
SIR PATRICK Youre sure there are no voices?
RIDGEON Quite sure.
SIR PATRICK Then it’s only foolishness.
RIDGEON Have you ever met anything like it before in your practice?
SIR PATRICK Oh, yes: often. It’s very common between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. It sometimes comes on again at forty or thereabouts. Youre a bachelor, you see. It’s not serious—if youre careful.
RIDGEON About my food?
SIR PATRICK No: about your behavior. Theres nothing wrong with your spine; and theres nothing wrong with your heart; but theres something wrong with your common sense. Youre not going to die; but you may be going to make a fool of yourself. So be careful.
RIDGEON I see you dont believe in my discovery. Well, sometimes I dont believe in it myself. Thank you all the same. Shall we have Walpole up?
SIR PATRICK Oh, have him up. [RIDGEON rings]. He’s a clever operator, is Walpole, though he’s only one of your chloroform surgeons. In my early days, you made your man drunk; and the porters and students held him down; and you had to set your teeth and finish the job fast. Nowadays you work at your ease; and the pain doesnt come until afterwards, when youve taken your cheque and rolled up your bag and left the house. I tell you, Colly, chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It’s enabled every fool to be a surgeon.
RIDGEON [to EMMY, who answers the bell] Shew MrWalpole up.
EMMY He’s talking to the lady.
RIDGEON [exasperated] Did I not tell you—
EMMY goes out without heeding him. He gives it up, with a shrug, and plants himself with his back to the console, leaning resignedly against it.
SIR PATRICK I know your Cutler Walpoles and their like. Theyve found out that a man’s body’s full of bits and scraps of old organs he has no mortal use for. Thanks to chloroform, you can cut half a dozen of them out without leaving him any the worse, except for the illness and the guineas it costs him. I knew the Walpoles well fifteen years ago. The father used to snip off the ends of people’s uvulas for fifty guineas, and paint throats with caustic every day for a year at two guineas a time. His brother-in-law extirpated tonsils for two hundred guineas until he took up women’s cases at double the fees. Cutler himself worked hard at anatomy to find something fresh to operate on; and at last he got hold of something he calls the nuciform sac,et which he’s made quite the fashion. People pay him five hundred guineas to cut it out. They might as well get their hair cut for all the difference it makes; but I suppose they feel important after it. You cant go out to dinner now without your neighbor bragging to you of some useless operation or other.
EMMY [announcing] Mr Cutler Walpole. [She goes out].
CUTLER WALPOLE is an energetic, unhesitating man of forty, with a cleanly modelled face, very decisive and symmetrical about the shortish, salient, rather pretty nose, and the three trimly turned corners made by his chin and jaws. In comparison with RIDGEON’s delicate broken lines, and SIR PATRICK’s softly rugged aged ones, his face looks machine-made and beeswaxed; but his scrutinizing, daring eyes give it life and force. He seems never at a loss, never in doubt: one feels that if he made a mistake he would make it thoroughly and firmly. He has neat, well-nourished bands, short arms, and is built for strength and compactness rather than for height. He is smartly dressed with a fancy waistcoat, a richly colored scarf secured by a handsome ring, ornaments on his watch chain, spats on his shoes, and a general air of the well-to-do sportsman about him. He goes straight across to RIDGEON and snakes hands with him.
WALPOLE My dear Ridgeon, best wishes! heartiest congratulations ! You deserve it.
RIDGEON Thank you.
WALPOLE As a man, mind you. You deserve it as a man. The opsonin is simple rot, as any capable surgeon can tell you; but we’re all delighted to see your personal qualities officially recognized. Sir Patrick: how are you? I sent you a paper lately about a little thing I invented: a new saw. For shoulder blades.
SIR PATRICK [meditatively] Yes: I got it. It’s a good saw: a useful, handy instrument.
WALPOLE [confidently] I knew youd see its points.
SIR PATRICK Yes: I remember that saw sixty-five years ago.
WALPOLE What!
SIR PATRICK It was called a cabinetmaker’s jimmy then.
WALPOLE Get out! Nonsense! Cabinetmaker be—
RIDGEON Never mind him, Walpole. He’s jealous.
WALPOLE By the way, I hope I’m not disturbing you two in anything private.
RIDGEON No no. Sit down. I was only consulting him. I’m rather out of sorts. Overwork, I suppose.
WALPOLE [swiftly] I know whats the matter with you. I can see it in your complexion. I can feel it in the grip of your hand.
RIDGEON What is it?
WALPOLE Blood-poisoning.
RIDGEON Blood-poisoning! Impossible.
WALPOLE I tell you, blood-poisoning. Ninety-five per cent of the human race suffer from chronic blood-poisoning, and die of it. It’s as simple as A. B. C. Your nuciform sac is full of decaying matter—undigested food and waste products—rank ptomaines. eu Now you take my advice, Ridgeon. Let me cut it out for you.You’ll be another man afterwards.
SIR PATRICK Dont you like him as he is?
WALPOLE No I dont. I dont like any man who hasnt a healthy circulation. I tell you this: in an intelligently governed country people wouldnt be allowed to go about with nuciform sacs, making themselves centres of infection. The operation ought to be compulsory: it’s ten times more important than vaccination.
SIR PATRICK Have you had your own sac removed, may I ask?
WALPOLE [triumphantly] I havnt got one. Look at me! Ive no symptoms. I’m as sound as a bell. About five per cent of the population havnt got any; and I’m one of the five per cent. I’ll give you an instance. You know Mrs Jack Foljambe: the smart Mrs Foljambe? I operated at Easter on her sister-in-law, Lady Gorran, and found she had the biggest sac I ever saw: it held about two ounces. Well, Mrs. Foljambe had the right spirit—the genuine hygienic instinct. She couldnt stand her sister-in-law being a clean, sound woman, and she simply a whited sepulchre.ev So she insisted on my operating on her, too. And by George, sir, she hadnt any sac at all. Not a trace! Not a rudiment! ! I was so taken aback—so interested, that I forgot to take the sponges out, and was stitching them up inside her when the nurse missed them. Somehow, I’d made sure she’d have an exceptionally large one. [He sits down on the couch, squaring his shoulders and shooting his hands out of his cuffs as he sets his knuckles akimbo].
EMMY [looking in] Sir Ralph Bloomfleld Bonington.
A long and expectant pause follows this announcement. All look to the door; but there is no SIR RALPH.
RIDGEON [at last] Where is he?
EMMY [looking back] Drat him, I thought he was following me. He’s stayed down to talk to that lady.
RIDGEON [exploding] I told you to tell that lady—[EMMY vanishes] .
WALPOLE [jumping up again] Oh, by the way, Ridgeon, that reminds me. Ive been talking to that poor girl. It’s her husband, band; and she thinks it’s a case of consumption: the usual wrong diagnosis: these damned general practitioners ought never to be allowed to touch a patient exce
pt under the orders of a consultant. ew She’s been describing his symptoms to me; and the case is as plain as a pikestaff: bad blood-poisoning. Now she’s poor. She cant afford to have him operated on. Well, you send him to me: I’ll do it for nothing. Theres room for him in my nursing home. I’ll put him straight, and feed him up and make her happy. I like making people happy. [He goes to the chair near the window].
EMMY [looking in] Here he is.
SIR RALPH BLOOMFIELD BONINGTON wafts himself into the room. He is a tall man, with a head like a tall and slender egg. He has been in his time a slender man; but now, in his sixth decade, his waistcoat has filled out somewhat. His fair eyebrows arch goodnaturedly and uncritically. He has a most musical voice; his speech is a perpetual anthem; and he never tires of the sound of it. He radiates an enormous self-satiifaction, cheering, reassuring, healing by the mere incompatibility of disease or anxiety with his welcome presence. Even broken bones, it is said, have been known to unite at the sound of his voice: he is a born healer, as independent if mere treatment and skill as any Christian scientist. When he expands into oratory or scientific exposition, he is as energetic as WALPOLE; but it is with a bland, voluminous, atmospheric energy, which envelops its subject and its audience, and makes interruption or inattention impossible, and imposes veneration and credulity on all but the strongest minds. He is known in the medical world as B. B.; and the envy roused by his success in practice is softened by the conviction that he is, scientifically considered, a colossal humbug: the fact being that, though he knows just as much (and just as little) as his contemporaries, the qualifications that pass muster in common men reveal their weakness when hung on his egregious personality.
B. B. Aha! Sir Colenso. Sir Colenso, eh? Welcome to the order of knighthood.
RIDGEON [shaking hands] Thank you, B. B.
B . B. What! Sir Patrick! And how are we to-day? A little chilly? a little stiff? but hale and still the cleverest of us all. [SIR PATRICK grunts]. What! Walpole! the absent-minded beggar: 7 eh?
WALPOLE What does that mean?
Pygmalion and Three Other Plays (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 28