And always Martin's work went on—assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations—sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb's cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wall-paper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest was nerve-gnawing.
Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep at his rickety study-table.
Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt raw.
Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stumbling students barked at by tired clinical professors.
The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.
Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva, known as "Dad" Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty. He was a round little man with a little crescent of mustache. Silva's god was Sir William Osler, his religion was the art of sympathetic healing, and his patriotism was accurate physical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin's reverence for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Roscoe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.
Roscoe Geake was a pedler. He would have done well with oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been placed in the human organism for the purpose of providing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly overlooking his future health and comfort—the physician's future health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal
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