That is the all-important point. Knowledge is power.
Most students of medicine become qualified at somewhere about twenty-three or four, but when I should have been doing well I had made a rather poor mess of things.
A father who had cut down his own personal expenses to a minimum, and a mother who, late in life, continued to churn her own butter at our Sussex farmhouse-home in order to provide me with a reasonable income, had both been grievously disappointed.
I had been sent up to Oxford, like so many others, with the reputation of a budding scholar; but instead of doing anything of note, I simply obtained a pass-degree which, as you know, means very little indeed; and then, after putting in another couple of years at Guy's, I found myself no further on, having still my intermediate-final to pass, nor, indeed, could I have answered many simple questions in anatomy or physiology, although my knowledge of billiards, bridge, actors and actresses was remarkably good.
Thus, when my father died suddenly, and with him my income, the chances I possessed of becoming a practitioner of medicine had apparently disappeared, for what he did leave
