Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [57]
“You haven’t stopped to think, Freddie. All you see is what’s in front of you at the moment. But what’ll you do in ten years’ time with your brain going to waste while you walk behind a couple of horses?”
He was right. Already in his heart the young Frederick knew that what he really wanted to do was follow William into medicine. He stuck out the next four years somehow, and at eighteen had become a student at the London Hospital, blessing William for saving him from a disastrous mistake. He loved the life at once, though it was the practical rather than the scientific aspects of medicine that appealed to him. It was said of him even then that he had “clever hands” and that he would be a surgeon.
After four years of study he qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and after a brief period as a house surgeon at the London he left to widen his experience by joining William, who was an honorary surgeon at the Royal National Hospital for Scrofula in Margate. He had it in his mind that he would make a name for himself in research, and William agreed with him that scrofula, about which little was known, was a good subject.
They had their first and only real quarrel a year later when Frederick threw it all up to become a general practitioner in Derbyshire.
“It’s the only way,” he’d argued. “I can’t afford to marry Anne unless I’ve got a proper practice.”
“Then throw Anne over,” William had said brutally. “Dammit, Freddie, you’re twenty-four. That’s much too young to be tossing away a career for marriage. But that’s always the trouble with you. You rush ahead without thinking.”
On this one occasion, Brother William had been wrong, Treves reflected. He was happy in his marriage, and it had not harmed his career. By studying in the evenings he passed further exams for the Royal College, and became a fellow of that august establishment. Two years after going into general practice in Derbyshire he was back at the London as a surgical registrar. He had progressed rapidly through assistant surgeon to full surgeon at the age of thirty-one. William had been generous enough to admit he’d been mistaken.
But about one thing he had not been mistaken, and even now Treves’ brow darkened when he thought of it. He’d continued his research into scrofula after he left Margate, certain that he was on the right track. At twenty-nine he’d been ready with his book on the subject, Scrofula and its Gland Diseases. He had confidently expected this to be the first step toward the making of his name, but William had advised against publication.
“Don’t be hasty, Freddie. You’ve missed something.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. If I did, I’d write a book about it myself. But there’s something wrong; I feel it. You’ve done it in too much of a rush.”
“A rush? I’ve spent years on it.”
“But you’ve rushed it recently, I know. You’re too impatient.”
“Don’t be an old woman,” Treves had told him amiably. “This book will make me.”
So he had gone ahead and published. And three months later a German bacteriologist called Robert Koch demonstrated that scrofula was due to the action of a bacillus. Treves, not an expert in bacteriology, had missed the significance of certain little signs that had spoken loudly to Koch. His book had sunk without a trace in the vast wash created by Koch’s.
He had written other books since, successful books that had brought him the serious attention he wanted. There was The Anatomy of the Intestinal Canal and Peritoneum, which had been called the best work on the subject so far. There was The Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Obstruction of the Intestine, for which the Royal College of Surgeons had awarded him the Jacksonian prize.
Yet nothing could quite wipe out the pain of that earlier piece of clumsiness, or obliterate William’s melancholy voice saying, “You rushed it, Freddie. You didn’t look where