61. CHAPTER LXI.
THE SURGEON OF THE FLEET.
Cadwallader Cuticle, M.D., and Honorary Member of
the most distinguished Colleges of Surgeons both in Europe
and America, was our Surgeon of the Fleet. Nor was he at
all blind to the dignity of his position; to which, indeed, he
was rendered peculiarly competent, if the reputation he enjoyed
was deserved. He had the name of being the foremost
Surgeon in the Navy, a gentleman of remarkable science, and
a veteran practitioner.
He was a small, withered man, nearly, perhaps quite, sixty
years of age. His chest was shallow, his shoulders bent, his
pantaloons hung round skeleton legs, and his face was singularly
attenuated. In truth, the corporeal vitality of this man
seemed, in a good degree, to have died out of him. He walked
abroad, a curious patch-work of life and death, with a wig,
one glass eye, and a set of false teeth, while his voice was
husky and thick; but his mind seemed undebilitated as in
youth; it shone out of his remaining eye with basilisk brilliancy.
Like most old physicians and surgeons who have seen much
service, and have been promoted to high professional place for
their scientific attainments, this Cuticle was an enthusiast in
his calling. In private, he had once been heard to say, confidentially,
that he would rather cut off a man's arm than dismember
the wing of the most delicate pheasant. In particular,
the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love;
and in his state-room below he had a most unsightly collection
of Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all
imaginable malformations of the human members, both organic
and induced by disease. Chief among these was a cast,
often to be met with in the Anatomical Museums of Europe,
and no doubt an unexaggerated copy of a genuine original;
it was the head of an elderly woman, with an aspect singularly
gentle and meek, but at the same time wonderfully expressive
of a gnawing sorrow, never to be relieved. You
would almost have thought it the face of some abbess, for
some unspeakable crime voluntarily sequestered from human
society, and leading a life of agonized penitence without hope;
so marvelously sad and tearfully pitiable was this head. But
when you first beheld it, no such emotions ever crossed your
mind. All your eyes and all your horrified soul were fast fascinated
and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn, like
that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead, and
partly shadowing the face; but as you gazed, the freezing fascination
of its horribleness gradually waned, and then your
whole heart burst with sorrow, as you contemplated those aged
features, ashy pale and wan. The horn seemed the mark of
a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and committed before
the spirit had entered the flesh. Yet that sin seemed
something imposed, and not voluntarily sought; some sin
growing out of the heartless necessities of the predestination
of things; some sin under which the sinner sank in sinless
woe.
But no pang of pain, not the slightest touch of concern,
ever crossed the bosom of Cuticle when he looked on this cast.
It was immovably fixed to a bracket, against the partition of
his state-room, so that it was the first object that greeted his
eyes when he opened them from his nightly sleep. Nor was
it to hide the face, that upon retiring, he always hung his
Navy cap upon the upward curling extremity of the horn, for
that obscured it but little.
The Surgeon's cot-boy, the lad who made up his swinging
bed and took care of his room, often told us of the horror he
sometimes felt when he would find himself alone in his master's
retreat. At times he was seized with the idea that Cuticle
was a preternatural being; and once entering his room in
the middle watch of the night, he started at finding it enveloped
in a thick, bluish vapor, and stifling with the odors of
brimstone. Upon hearing a low groan from the smoke, with
a wild cry he darted from the place, and, rousing the occupants
of the neighboring state-rooms, it was found that the
vapor proceeded from smoldering bunches of Lucifer matches,
which had become ignited through the carelessness of the Surgeon.
Cuticle, almost dead, was dragged from the suffocating
atmosphere, and it was several days ere he completely recovered
from its effects. This accident took place immediately over
the powder magazine; but as Cuticle, during his sickness,
paid dearly enough for transgressing the laws prohibiting combustibles
in the gun-room, the Captain contented himself with
privately remonstrating with him.
Well knowing the enthusiasm of the Surgeon for all specimens
of morbid anatomy, some of the ward-room officers used
to play upon his credulity, though, in every case, Cuticle was
not long in discovering their deceptions. Once, when they
had some sago pudding for dinner, and Cuticle chanced to be
ashore, they made up a neat parcel of this bluish-white, firm,
jelly-like preparation, and placing it in a tin box, carefully
sealed with wax, they deposited it on the gun-room table,
with a note, purporting to come from an eminent physician
in Rio, connected with the Grand National Museum on the
Praca d'Acclamacao, begging leave to present the scientific
Senhor Cuticle—with the donor's compliments—an uncommonly
fine specimen of a cancer.
Descending to the ward-room, Cuticle spied the note, and
no sooner read it, than, clutching the case, he opened it, and
exclaimed, “Beautiful! splendid! I have never seen a finer
specimen of this most interesting disease.”
“What have you there, Surgeon Cuticle?” said a Lieutenant,
advancing.
“Why, sir, look at it; did you ever see any thing more
exquisite?”
“Very exquisite indeed; let me have a bit of it, will you,
Cuticle?”
“Let you have a bit of it!” shrieked the Surgeon, starting
back. “Let you have one of my limbs! I wouldn't mar so
large a specimen for a hundred dollars; but what can you
want of it? You are not making collections!”
“I'm fond of the article,” said the Lieutenant; “it's a fine
cold relish to bacon or ham. You know, I was in New Zealand
last cruise, Cuticle, and got into sad dissipation there
among the cannibals; come, let's have a bit, if it's only a
mouthful.”
“Why, you infernal Feejee!” shouted Cuticle, eyeing the
other with a confounded expression; “you don't really mean
to eat a piece of this cancer?”
“Hand it to me, and see whether I will not,” was the reply.
“In God's name, take it!” cried the Surgeon, putting the
case into his hands, and then standing with his own uplifted.
“Steward!” cried the Lieutenant, “the castor—quick!
I always use plenty of pepper with this dish, Surgeon; it's
oystery. Ah! this is really delicious,” he added, smacking
his lips over a mouthful. “Try it now, Surgeon, and you'll
never keep such a fine dish as this, lying uneaten on your
hands, as a mere scientific curiosity.”
Cuticle's whole countenance changed; and, slowly walking
up to the table, he put his nose close to the tin case, then
touched its contents with his finger and tasted it. Enough.
Buttoning up his coat, in all the tremblings of an old man's
rage he burst from the ward-room, and, calling for a boat, was
not seen again for twenty-four hours.
But though, like all other mortals, Cuticle was subject at
times to these fits of passion—at least under outrageous provocation—nothing
could exceed his coolness when actually
employed in his imminent vocation. Surrounded by moans
and shrieks, by features distorted with anguish inflicted by
himself, he yet maintained a countenance almost supernaturally
calm; and unless the intense interest of the operation
flushed his wan face with a momentary tinge of professional
enthusiasm, he toiled away, untouched by the keenest misery
coming under a fleet-surgeon's eye. Indeed, long habituation
to the dissecting-room and the amputation-table had made
him seemingly impervious to the ordinary emotions of humanity.
Yet you could not say that Cuticle was essentially a
cruel-hearted man. His apparent heartlessness must have
been of a purely scientific origin. It is not to be imagined
even that Cuticle would have harmed a fly, unless he could
procure a microscope powerful enough to assist him in experimenting
on the minute vitals of the creature.
But notwithstanding his marvelous indifference to the sufferings
of his patients, and spite even of his enthusiasm in his
vocation—not cooled by frosting old age itself—Cuticle, on
some occasions, would affect a certain disrelish of his profession,
and declaim against the necessity that forced a man of
his humanity to perform a surgical operation. Especially
was it apt to be thus with him, when the case was one of
more than ordinary interest. In discussing it, previous to
setting about it, he would vail his eagerness under an aspect
of great circumspection, curiously marred, however, by continual
sallies of unsuppressible impatience. But the knife
once in his hand, the compassionless surgeon himself, undisguised,
stood before you. Such was Cadwallader Cuticle,
our Surgeon of the Fleet.
