Free Doctor in the House by Richard Gordon

while he was talking, like a child impatient to see inside a Christmas parcel.
    ‘Well,’ he went on, all affability again, seemingly conducting the operation with the concentration of a gossipy woman knitting a pair of socks, ‘I said to this old lady, “Gallstones, eh? Now, my dear, what makes you think you’ve got gallstones?” And I’ve never seen anyone look so embarrassed in my life!’
    He returned to the operation.
    ‘What’s this structure, gentlemen?’
    A reply came from under a student’s mask on the edge of the crowd.
    ‘Quite correct, whoever you are,’ said Sir Lancelot, but without any congratulation in his voice. ‘Glad to see you fellers remember a little fundamental anatomy from your two years in the rooms…so I wondered what was up. After all, patients don’t get embarrassed over gallstones. It’s only piles and things like that, and even then it’s never the old ladies who are coy but the tough young men. Remember that bit of advice, gentlemen… Come on, Stubbins, wake up! You’re as useless as an udder on a bull.’
    He produced the appendix from the wound like a bird pulling a worm from the ground, and laid it and the attached intestine on a little square of gauze.
    ‘Then the old lady said to me, “As a matter of fact, Sir Lancelot, I’ve been passing them all month…” Don’t lean on the patient, Stubbins! If I’m not tired you shouldn’t be, and I can give you forty or fifty years, my lad.
    ‘So now we come to the interesting part of the story. She showed me a little box, like those things you send out pieces of wedding cake in… Sister! What in the name of God are you threading your needles with? This isn’t catgut, it’s rope. What’s that, woman?’ He leant the red ear that stuck out below his cap towards her. ‘Speak up, don’t mutter to yourself. I’m not being rude, damn you! I’m never rude in the theatre. All right, tell your Matron, but give us a decent ligature. That’s more like it. Swab, man, swab. Stubbins, did I ever tell you about the Matron when she was a junior theatre nurse? She had a terrible crush on a fellow house-surgeon of mine – chap called Bungo Ross, used to drink like a fish and a devil for the women. Became a respected GP in Bognor or somewhere. Died last year. I wrote a damn good obituary for him in the British Medical Journal . I’m tying off the appendicular artery, gentlemen. See? What’s that, Stubbins? Oh, the old lady. Cherry stones.’
    He tossed the appendix into a small enamel bowl held for him by Stubbins.
    ‘Looks a bit blue this end, George,’ he said in the direction of the anaesthetist. ‘All right, I suppose?’ The anaesthetist was at the time in the corner of the theatre talking earnestly to one of the nurses who had been serving out the instruments. Theatre kit is unfair to nurses; it makes them look like white bundles. But one could tell from the rough shape of this one, from the little black-stockinged ankles below her gown and the two wide eyes above her mask, that the parcel would be worth the unwrapping. The anaesthetist jumped back to his trolley and began to twiddle the knobs on it. Sister, who was already in a wild temper, injected the nurse with a glance like a syringeful of strychnine.
    ‘Forceps, Sister!’ bellowed Sir Lancelot. She handed him a pair which he looked at closely, snapping them together in front of his mask. For some reason they displeased him, so he threw them over the heads of the crowd at the opposite wall. This caused no surprise to anyone, and seemed to be one of his usual habits. She calmly handed him another pair.
    ‘Swabs correct, Sister, before I close? Good. Terribly important that, gentlemen. Once you’ve left a swab inside a patient you’re finished for life. Courts, damages, newspapers, and all that sort of thing. It’s the only disaster in surgery the blasted public thinks it knows anything about. Cut their throats when they’re under the anaesthetic, yes, but leave