Dr. North’s Wound
In the end, neither side won. Love was to remain a mystery for the evening.
The meal proceeded civilly, as these occasions must, with further polite conversation, and some more robust banter between the men when we retired to the smoking room, and the subjects of love and universal energy were laid to rest, replaced with talk of money and society and matters of politics, none of which interested me one whit (unless my fear of failure and becoming a pauper constitutes an interest in money and society). My thoughts, even as I tried my utmost to be an entertaining companion, were elsewhere.
In speaking of love so foolishly, I found none in that house that evening, other than that which I secretly and unrequitedly held for Arabella Fanshawe.
One of my duties as the doctor’s assistant was to keep a log book, a register if you will, of his studies and experiments; this was not his physician’s casebook, mind, for that he recorded in his own hand. The log was a dated record, in tabular form of each experiment, its purpose and protocols, its successes and (most often) failures.
For example, it is recorded that, on the 13th of May 1869, in a treatment of Mrs Susan Middlemiss for influenza, a swab was taken from the inside of each cheek pouch, and droplets of perspiration from her temple. These were distilled with a chemical compound of his own devising and examined under his brass microscope through the finest ground lenses from Switzerland. The log records the microscopic organisms in both the saliva and the perspiration, the degree of salinity in each, and so on. In the box for comments, I was instructed to write “Bacterium. Are the feelings, the senses, also a result of bacterium being transmitted between one person and the next? Are emotions of anger, desire, or love indeed, a consequence merely of the humors which can cause fever?”
I knew better than to comment upon these findings, but my increasing discomfort with the unwitting nature of his subjects’ participation in his experiments, troubled me.
Another troublesome aspect of working with the doctor was his regular disappearances from the town. It was known that he was seeing a woman, though it was not in his nature to discuss their relationship, or even hint at who she was. What was apparent was that his acquaintance never visited Dr. North at home. At first I considered there might be an affair, but given his lack of passion for anything but work this seemed unlikely.
One day I was preparing laudanum for one patient, mercurochrome for another, and a belladonna extract for another who had been poisoned. In the latter case Dr. North was convinced that one poison would counteract the other, though it must be administered with great care.
Tired from long hours of work, the experiments being conducted outwith my normal working hours, unwaged I might add, that I turned as the laboratory door opened and my sleeve caught the laudanum bottle and dashed it to the ground, where is smashed and the pungent liquid was blotted by the Persian carpet.
“Oh!”
“Dammit, man, how can you be so careless?” My employer hissed at me. “You are a buffoon, at times, Jerome! This will come out of your wages.” He had just returned from one of his trips, but I did not have the good grace to put his response down to travel weariness.
Instead I was furious, and I stood up to gaze steadfastly at him; at half a head taller than he I should not have felt intimidated, and yet I did, and my intestines twisted as I rebuked him. “Doctor, how can you expect the best of me if you drive me day and night like a beast of burden? I work hard for you, do I not, and while I am grateful for your tutelage it is more than repaid in my time in assisting you in your experiments.”
“How dare you! I ask nothing of you that I do not ask of myself, and if you are so ungrateful…”
I lowered my eyes, trying in vain to retain my stance of righteous indignation, but said: “It is not only that, Dr. North, but in truth I have concerns about the…other work.”
Having spoken out finally I looked at him again, and to my surprise saw his countenance soften; the cloudy brow cleared and his eyes sparked with mischief. I saw there his undoubted attractiveness, his appeal to the women in his care, but also how he would play with the emotions of others while feeling nothing himself, unless calculation is an emotion. Nevertheless, I let him influence me, as he usually did, and I was even grateful when he said: “Jerome, my boy, you dwell on matters of the heart too much; you are led by your feelings rather than your thoughts. I have harmed no one, and these people are too simple to understand why I test them in less conventional ways than they might expect.”
