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“Stop that noise!” roared the Doctor. “Look here, Mr Hopkins, after twenty-four hours the integuments of the palm were flaccid and discoloured … Imagine how I felt! If you put any pressure on the wound a thin, sanious fluid with bubbles of gas escaped, causing considerable pain …”
“Then,” said the Doctor, gripping the Collector’s arm for he had stepped back, dizzy from the heat and smell, not to mention the noise (for, in addition to this desperate chanting there were groans and cries of men calling for attention), “the thumb was dark and cold and insensible. Another twelve hours and the dark hue of mortification had already spread over half the palm … the thumb and two fingers were already cold, livid and without sensation …”
“The pulse was small and frequent, the smell from the mortifying parts was particularly offensive, Mr Hopkins. I now advised amputation of the forearm, close to the carpal end … Silence! I had thought that it would be enough to remove part of the hand only, but this was out of the question … Ah, this wasn’t good enough for McNab! He said gangrene must follow . . - d’you hear? So for forty-eight hours it was left wrapped in a linseed poultice. This was not my idea. I knew the whole hand must come off in the end and that there would be no gangrene of the stump … Here, sir, you can see for yourself the way the flaps are uniting in healthy granulations. D’you think that was McNab’s linseed poultice? Had we waited a moment longer the man would have sunk completely!”
“No, no,” broke in the Collector hurriedly. “Please don’t undo the dressing. I shall see it when you’re discharged fit,” he added brightly to the patient who paid no attention to him whatsoever; the man’s eyes continued to roam about feverishly.
The Doctor tried to detain him for further explanations but the Collector forced him aside, unable to spend another moment by this bedside. He strode to the nearest window and looked out, clumsily knocking over a pitcher of water as he did so. It emptied itself in slow gulps on to the earthen floor by his feet. Beyond the deep shadow in which the horses of the Sikh cavalry stamped and thrashed in a frenzy of irritation from the flies which attacked them, he thought he could perceive a splash of colour from the few surviving roses beneath the shade of the wickerwork screens. He gazed at them greedily.
Then Fleury came into view, carrying the bottles of mustard and looking excited. Seeing the Collector at the window he called: “Mrs Scott has been taken ill.”
The Collector immediately put his finger to his lips and shook his head vigorously, pointing towards the next ward, to indicate that Fleury should inform McNab. Fleury, however, simply stopped in his tracks and stared at the Collector in astonishment, unable to comprehend why the most important personage in the garrison should suddenly resort to this baffling pantomine. He came closer and the Collector, concluding that Fleury was a dimwit (a conclusion supported, moreover, by his peculiar ideas on civilization) said in an undertone: “Tell Dr McNab. Dunstaple already has too much to do. He must be spared. Here, give me those.” And he took the bottles of mustard through the window, thinking: “What a time the poor mite has chosen to come into the world!”
The Doctor seemed surprised at first to be presented with the mustard and looked so irritated that the Collector wondered whether there had not been some mistake. But then the Doctor remembered, he had a case of cholera … it was almost certainly cholera, though sometimes when the men first reported sick it was hard to know from their symptoms whether they were suffering from cholera or from bilious remittent fever.
Cholera. The Collector could see Dr Dunstaple’s anger swelling, as if himself infected by the mere sound of the three syllables. And the Collector dreaded what was to come, for the subject of cholera invariably acted like a stimulant on the already overwrought Doctor. Cholera, evidently, had been the cause of the dispute between him and McNab which had brought about an unfortunate rift between the two doctors. Now he began, once again, to speak with a terrible eloquence about the iniquities of McNab’s “experimental” treatments and quackery cures. Suddenly, he seized the Collector’s wrist and dragged him across the ward to a mattress on which, pale as milk beneath a cloud of flies, a gaunt man lay shivering, stark naked.
“He’s now in the consecutive fever . . How d’you think I cured this man? How d’you think I saved his life?”
The Collector offered no suggestions so the Doctor explained that he had used the best treatment known to medical science, the way he had been taught as a student, the treatment which, for want of a specific, every physician worthy of the name accorded his cholera patients … calomel, opium and poultices, together with brandy as a stimulant. Every half hour he gave pills of calomel (half a grain), opium and capsicum (of each one-eighth of a grain). Calomel, the Collector probably didn’t know, was an admirable aperient for cleansing the upper intestinal canal of the morbid cholera poison. At the same time, to relieve the cramps he had applied fla
The Doctor was gri
“I copied it from the quack’s medical diary … With his permission, of course. He’s always making notes. No doubt he thinks he will make an impression with them. Read it. It concerns a cholera case … He wrote it, I believe, in Muttra about three years ago. Go on. Read it . - .” And he winked encouragingly at the Collector.
The Collector took the paper with reluctance and read: