Doctor at Sea

miles astern of the one he calculated from his revolutions. Indeed, according to the Chief Engineer, the machinery and boilers of the Lotus should have arrived in any port several days in advance of the rest of the vessel.
    There were two other Mates, a gang of engineers, a wireless operator and - as the Lotus carried more than ninety-nine souls when she was full - a doctor.
    The doctor was by order of the Ministry of Transport, the uncompromising power who prescribes on every item of a sailor’s life from the number of lifeboats to be available in emergency to the number of times he shall have eggs for his breakfast. Ninety-eight souls can sail the seas until they are carried away with obscure nautical illness, like the shipmates of the Ancient Mariner: their health is preserved with a bottle of black draught, the Ship Captain's Medical Guide, and a scalpel also used for sharpening the chart-room pencil. The Second Mate or the Chief Steward holds the keys of the drug chest and practises daily, after breakfast. All pains below the umbilicus are treated with strong purgative, all disturbances above with Ministry cough mixture, and lesions on the remainder of the body with turpentine liniment. Obviously there occur from time to time more alarming complaints, and these are submitted to surgery under wireless instructions by the Captain on the saloon table, after the patient and the surgeon have taken sufficient brandy to instil in each other confidence that both will survive the operation.
    But one more soul on board brings to all the benefits of medical science - or as much of it as the doctor can remember, because ship surgeons are notoriously forgetful of these things. The sea induces an attitude of pleasant detachment towards problems that strain thought ashore, including those of the diagnosis and prognosis of disease, and the doctor has few professional obligations to distract him from his pastimes or enrich him with experience. For these reasons the companies naturally dislike the expense of carrying him - but then, the Fathom Steamship Company would have objected to the expense of lifeboats.
    When I met the Lotus she was lying in Liverpool, due to sail with a cargo of machinery and motor-cars to Santos, in Brazil. It had then been raining on Merseyside for four days. The damp November wind channelled itself down the river, broke against the waterfront buildings, and ran up the cold streets behind. The birds on the Liver building, that are unfairly supposed by Liverpool seafarers to flap their wings when passed by a woman of untarnished virtue, wept ceaselessly on to the bleak pierhead. The Birkenhead ferry forced its way miserably across the choppy harbour, the landing-stage looked as forlorn as a bandstand in midwinter, and even the stonework of the St George’s Hall appeared in danger of showing through its crust of soot.
    It was about eight in the evening, the hour when the shipowners are fed in the Adelphi. As they glumly finished their Martinis in the little American bar they calculated among themselves the rain’s cost in delayed cargo working. Outside in Lime Street the adolescent tarts already clung hopefully to their damp doorways. The dripping buses took home the last pale shipping clerks, the overhead railway rattled along its grotesque track, and the dock police steamed themselves warm in front of the stoves in their cabins. The Lotus herself lay lifeless at her quay with tarpaulins tented over her hatches, creaking gently at her mooring ropes like an old bed in a bad dream.
    I stood in the rain on the quayside reading a large sheet of printed instructions for resuscitating the apparently drowned. This was the only information of any sort available to passers-by. The wharf was deserted. The cranes huddled together in a row, a few railway trucks crouched between their legs; the warehouses were shut, locked, and abandoned even by the cats; the Lotus, lit with a few dim lights, looked as uninviting as a shut pub.
    I was a young doctor with a bad diploma passing through the difficult stage of professional adolescence when you discover the medical schools teach as little about medicine as the public schools do about life. My knowledge of seafaring was based only on Treasure Island, pictures in the windows of Cook’s, and a walking-on part I had been allowed to play in a students’production of The Middle Watch. I was nevertheless a recognized sailor. I had in my pocket a new seaman’s identity card