Ship's doctor

“ When the three midshipmen reached deck and it was learned that they were midshipmen of the United States Navy, the cheering and interest were redoubled.
But the captain and the ship's doctor cut short any attempt at lionizing by rushing the midshipmen to a stateroom containing three berths. Here, under the doctor's orders, the trio were stripped and rubbed down. Then they were rolled into blankets, and hot coffee brought to them in their berths, while their wet clothing was sent below to one of the furnace rooms for hurried drying. ”

“ The captain looked at the ship's doctor significantly and dismissed the two oilers with instructions to return to their duties.
"Found him locked in a small compartment down near the auxiliary engine room," the commander said briefly. "Hotter than blazes, and no air whatever where he was. He made his whereabouts known by tapping a message on a steam-pipe."
"H'm," said the doctor, whose youthful appearance might not give a stranger a proper measure of his long and varied experience. "Nearly suffocated, too. He couldn't have lasted there much longer. His heart action is pretty weak even yet. ”

“ I answered promptly, wondering, and the door closed behind Barraclough.
"Doctor, I haven't slept a wink for nights," burst out the captain suddenly; "I must have something."
He had a haggard, drawn look, and his eyes seemed sunken in his head. At once I was the professional man, and not an officer of the ship.
"Sit down, sir," said I, "and tell me. What is it?"
He sat down shakily. "I don't like my officers, doctor, and I don't like my employer," he said peevishly. I held his pulse, which was jumping.
"What else," I said.
"You are not a married man?" ”

“ However, his manner as he spoke of the ship was peculiar.
"You are very good, doctor," I said. "But, really, I believe even now the cabin could be aired, or cleaned out, or something. Why do you not care for the ship?"
"We are not superstitious in our profession, sir," replied the doctor, "but the sea makes people so. ”

“ That is a good large crew, isn’t it, simply to pull you out to a ship and back?”
“It isn’t a man too much, either, doctor, and when you have seen our Breaksea in a storm of wind and rain you’ll agree with me. Besides, that gig is all I have to take me to my patients across the bay, up the harbour to the town. Of course there is a path to the town round the cliffs from the lighthouse, where I live.”
“You saw it as we passed, doctor. Gladman is lighthouse-keeper, among other things,” put in the skipper. ”

“ As I climbed into the bunk over the Doctor's and pulled the blankets snugly round me, I found I could look out of the port-hole at my elbow, and, without raising my head from the pillow, could see the lights of Penzance swinging gently up and down with the motion of the ship at anchor. It was like being rocked to sleep with a little show going on to amuse you. I was just deciding that I liked the life of the sea very much when I fell fast asleep. ”

“ But every once in a while huge gray-black waves would arise from under the ship’s side like nightmare monsters, swell and climb, then crash down upon us, pressing us into the sea; and the poor Curlew would come to a standstill, half under water, like a gasping, drowning pig.
While I was clambering along towards the wheel to see the Doctor, clinging like a leech with hands and legs to the rails lest I be blown overboard, one of these tremendous seas tore loose my hold, filled my throat with water and swept me like a cork the full length of the deck. ”

“ No one sees much of the ship’s officers except perhaps the ubiquitous purser and the amiable doctor, and how these two, harried and beset as they are by a hundred cares, by the little miseries of other people, can present an unfailing front of courtesy, can go smilingly and cheerily about their duties, is one of the sea mysteries yet unsolved. ”

“ I suppose you think nobody can make, a pun or a pill, in the ship, but yourself?”
“If my pills were no better than your puns,” muttered the doctor, “we should all be in a bad way.”
The captain then directed the carpenter not to allow any nails to the doctor, or the use of any of his tools; he even told the poor surgeon that he did not know how to make a pill, and that “he was as useless as the Navy Board.” He accused him of ignorance in other parts of his profession; and, ordering all the sick men on deck, rope-ended them to increase their circulation, and put a little life into them. ”

“ We are not superstitious, now we are sure a matter may be mysterious only when we have not had the leisure to test it in the right way, but we have our private reservations. There is a ship's doctor, who has been called a hard case by those who know him, for he has grown grey and serious in watching humanity from the Guinea Coast to the South Seas. ”

“ Many doctors come into the Navy from civil practice, as Medical Reserve officers for the duration of the war, and wonder at first how they are going to carry on without women nurses, and in the small confines of a fighting ship. The first discovery they all make — and admit with a simplicity that is quite touching to a doctor of the regular Navy — is that the hospital corpsmen, some of whom are lads less than twenty years old, who were students, plumbers, shoe clerks, morticians' helpers, and welders before they enlisted, make most efficient, dependable, and loyal nurses. ”

“ When the animals and the little boy saw the Doctor and Jip coming back to the ship with a red-headed man, they began to cheer and yell and dance about the boat. And the swallows up above started whistling at the top of their voices—thousands and millions of them—to show that they too were glad that the boy's brave uncle had been found. The noise they made was so great that sailors far out at sea thought that a terrible storm was coming. ”

“ There had been no lightning; nothing, as far as we could discover, to produce blindness. Still the captain refused to leave the deck, declaring that it would pass over. The doctor, who had turned in, was called up, and came to him.
The increasing gale compelled the mate to attend to the duties of the ship. The doctor summoned me to assist in leading the captain below. I took his arm; he was trembling like an aspen. We led him to his berth, and assisted him to undress. ”

“ Sometimes the Bristolman will signal to a passing steamer for a doctor. The doctors of the African and British African boats are much thought of all down the Coast, and are only second in importance to the doctor on board a telegraph ship, who, being a rare specimen, is regarded as, ipso facto, more gifted, so that people will save up their ailments for the telegraph ship’s medical man, which is not a bad practice, as it leads commonly to their getting over those ailments one way or the other by the time the telegraph ship arrives. ”

“ While the typhoon which caught you as well as us was at its height our rudder broke adrift, and on getting it on board to repair, it came right down on his leg, crushing it fearfully. We all thought he must have died, for you see our doctor had left the ship some time before, and there was no one who knew what was to be done. So our skipper sat down on the deck and ordered the carpenter to bring him the surgical instruments. Our carpenter is a wonderfully clever fellow, and between them they managed to saw off the leg below the knee, to take up the arteries and stop the bleeding. ”

“ Each one of us had some special job to do, part of the proper running of a ship. Even old Polynesia was taking the sea's temperature with the Doctor's bath-thermometer tied on the end of a string, to make sure there were no icebergs near us. As I listened to her swearing softly to herself because she couldn't read the pesky figures in the fading light, I realized that the voyage had begun in earnest and that very soon it would be night—my first night at sea! ”

“ You've done enough in furnishing the ship and crew. I'll attend to the rest."
"And Beth and I will be Uncle John's assistants," said Patsy. "We shall want heaps of lint and bandages, drugs and liniments and—"
"And, above all, a doctor," advised Ajo. "One of the mates on my yacht, Kelsey by name, is a half-way physician, having studied medicine in his youth and practiced it on the crew for the last dozen years; but what we really need on a hospital ship is a bang-up surgeon." ”

“ Two days after was the Sabbath, and before divisions the commander and first lieutenant, accompanied by Surgeon Grant, walked round the ship and down below to inspect. As usual, those of the sick who could stand were drawn up in single file. Now, the skipper ought to have asked the surgeon, not the men, about their complaints, only Flint was still intent on bringing the doctor low. ”

“ The arm is merely crushed,” said the boy; and then, bit by bit, he read off the far-distant surgeon’s directions for treating the injured member. As he read, the captain and his assistant amateur surgeons plied dressings and antiseptics with diligent care.
At last the doctor of the Parisian said that he had no more advice to give that night, but flashed a prescription for a soothing draught to be compounded from the ship’s medicine chest. ”

“ If anything should go wrong, they must wait until a ship comes in sight, to communicate their tidings by flag signals. If the call is urgent, say for illness, and the passing boat carries a doctor, she will heave to, and, if conditions permit, will launch a boat to carry the medical man to the rock to administer aid. If it is a matter of life or death, the ship will take the man off. ”

“ THE RATS' WARNING
RAGGING a ship through the sea is hard work. And after two or three hours the swallows began to get tired in the wings and short of breath. Then they sent a message down to the Doctor to say that they would have to take a rest soon; and that they would pull the boat over to an island not far off, and hide it in a deep bay till they had got breath enough to go on. ”

“ A boat was soon lowered, and half an hour afterwards I found myself on board the good ship Morning Star, homeward bound to England from India.
"The captain received me very kindly, and supplied me with some dry clothes, giving me at the same time a good meal, of which I stood much in need. The anxiety and exposure I had undergone, however, made me quite ill, and for three or four days I was under the doctor's care. ”

“ The girl ran out to me, with Bill and the Doctor at her heels. The Doctor took in what had happened.
"The r-r-r-ray made slow p-p-p-p-poisons in their blood. Not adjusted right. It can upset the chemical equilibrium of the body in a thousand ways. But let's get b-b-b-back in the other ship before something happens."
We got through the manhole. I closed it again and unfastened the clamps that held us to the other ship, while the Doctor and Bill ran forward into the pilot's compartment. I felt the vessel rise.
Ellen and I stood by one of the round ports. ”

“ Doctor! Doctor! Wake up! Listen! I've got it! The wind's from the West and it smells of nothing but snuff. Come upstairs and start the ship—quick!"
So the Doctor tumbled out of bed and went to the rudder to steer the ship.
"Now I'll go up to the front," said Jip; "and you watch my nose—whichever way I point it, you turn the ship the same way. The man cannot be far off—with the smell as strong as this. And the wind's all lovely and wet. Now watch me!"
So all that morning Jip stood in the front part of the ship, sniffing the wind and pointing the way for the Doctor to steer ”

“ And the Doctor asked them if they had seen anything of a man with red hair and an anchor tattooed on his arm.
"Do you mean the master of The Saucy Sally?" asked the porpoises.
"Yes," said the Doctor. "That's the man. Has he been drowned?"
"His fishing-sloop was sunk," said the porpoises—"for we saw it lying on the bottom of the sea. But there was nobody inside it, because we went and looked."
"His little nephew is on the ship with me here," said the Doctor. "And he is terribly afraid that the pirates threw his uncle into the sea. ”

“ Every ship's crew has its quota of gold-brickers who try to work the doctor for a sick badge which automatically lets them off duty as long as they wear it. There is a continual contest between their ingenuity in devising symptoms and your skill in detecting it. Eventually you acquire a nose for malingerers and invent ways of dealing with them or, better still, of letting their shipmates deal with them.
A man in the black gang came several times to the sick bay, complaining of heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion is something our engine-room gangs used to suffer from a great deal. ”

“ I told you in Puddleby I didn’t want you. You had no right to come.”
“But Captain,” said the able seaman, “you can’t sail this ship without me. You don’t understand navigation. Why, look at the compass now: you’ve let her swing a point and a half off her course. It’s madness for you to try to do this trip alone—if you’ll pardon my saying so, Sir. Why—why, you’ll lose the ship!”
“Look here,” said the Doctor, a sudden stern look coming into his eyes, “losing a ship is nothing to me. I’ve lost ships before and it doesn’t bother me in the least. When I set out to go to a place, I get there. ”

“ There is something in the air of strange lands that draws Englishmen together. I had been sent out for my health; so had he, he told me with a jolly laugh, “quite a wreck, they said, ten years ago!” I told him the latest medical news from England, and found he was only a fortnight behind me! and saw his Medical Journal and Lancet as regularly as I did. As we sat down to the saloon table, I asked him how they managed for a pilot, supposing a ship should come in and signal for one, while he was away across the bay, or over on the bush, in his capacity of doctor. ”

“ It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship’s routine, which I have seen soothe—at least for a time—the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship’s life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the ship’s routine. ”