This surely is one profession which ever keeps its face
to the front. Burying its past mistakes and forgetting them as
speedily as possible, it pushes straight forward into fresh fields
and fresh patients, always hopeful of what the future may bring
in the way of newly discovered and highly expensive ailments. As
we look backward upon the centuries we are astonished by its
advancement. I did a good deal of looking backwards upon the
centuries during my sojourn at St. Germicide's.
Take the Middle Ages now--the period when a barber and a surgeon
were one and the same. If a man made a failure as a barber he
turned his talents to surgery. Surgeons in those times were a
husky breed. I judge they worked by the day instead of by piecework;
anyhow the records show they were very fond of experiments where
somebody else furnished the raw material.
When there came a resounding knock at the tradesman's entrance of
the moated grange, the lord of the manor, looking over the portcullis
and seeing a lusty wight standing down below, in a leather apron,
with his sleeves rolled up and a kit of soldering tools under his
arm, didn't know until he made inquiry whether the gentle stranger
had come to mend the drain or remove the cook's leg.
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