Free The Dead Shall Not Rest by Tessa Harris

him to listen past the gurglings of the trachea and the rumblings of the stomach and journey into the inner cavern of the rib cage that housed the lungs. This would be the perfect occasion for its first real trial.
    The giant looked at him suspiciously as he held the strange contraption in his hand. “Could you open your shirt, Mr. Byrne?” asked Thomas. “I hope to listen to your lungs.”
    His reluctant patient obliged and Thomas set to work. Putting the widest part of the cone onto the bare chest, he closed his eyes. He could hear the sound of the ocean, of waves washing against a shore, but beyond that there was more. There was the sound of a rhythmical rattle, a telltale rasp coming from the lungs that to him cried out just one word—tuberculosis.
     
    That night six men met in an upper room at St. George’s. Sir Oliver De Vere, the new chief surgeon, a cunning politician who would always play one man off against another for his own gain, sat at the head of a long table. Now that Sir Tobias was gone they could formulate a plan. John Hunter was too arrogant. John Hunter was too powerful. John Hunter was bringing their profession into disrepute, embracing newfangled instruments and unproven hypotheses, expostulating absurd theories, and even consorting with known criminals. Their list of grievances against him was endless.
    To start, this John Hunter dared to challenge the great Galen. Thomas Keate spoke out: “Surely, it is a universally held truth that all illnesses stem from an imbalance of bodily humors? He would challenge that, sir!” he told Sir Oliver.
    “What cheek, what audacity!” cried John Gunning.
    But there was more. This philistine, this Scotchman, eschewed the time-honored tradition of bloodletting, that most versatile means of both prevention and cure of almost every imaginable ill. “He would deny this most basic principle,” wailed William Walker, his head in his hands.
    “And instead of inducing a healing pus, he would allow wounds to scab over,” added Gunning indignantly once more.
    Worse still, Hunter was pressing for free lectures to be delivered to students, allowing them to practice their craft on real corpses. Sir Tobias had fallen into his trap and had been about to grant his wish when he so conveniently gave up the ghost. As if the practice of dissection could ever further the art of anatomy. “He grows too big for his boots!” exclaimed Everard Home, Hunter’s son-in-law, and they all shouted “Aye!” in agreement.
    Apart from their professional differences of opinion, there was, of course, the matter of the Scotchman’s upbringing and origins. He was not one of them. He had not attended a good school, nor even been educated in the classics. He had shunned elocution lessons and spoke in his coarse Scottish Lowland burr. How could a surgeon take the Hippocratic Oath when, in all probability, he did not have an inkling as to the character or background of the great Hippocrates himself, they asked. He was terse in manner and sharp of tongue. He did not hold back in his criticism of them and spoke his mind far too freely. A soft humor and a winning smile were not his way. His conceited insolence and insufferable vanity, they said, were out of hand. Yet his physical appearance, disheveled and unkempt, with no notion of fashion or flair, showed him to be of a base and vulgar disposition.
    There were rumors, too. Rumors they found very easy to believe; that he consorted with the lowest sort in taverns and did deals with resurrectionists to procure his corpses. “We’ve all been known to do that when times are hard,” admitted Walker, “but these footpads, coves, and cutpurses he treats almost as his equals.”
    Keate agreed, banging his fist on the table. “He is nothing more than a cozening mountebank and a dilettante quack, and his ‘work,’ such as it is, is damaging our reputation and tarnishing our profession.”
    Sir Oliver, who had been listening attentively in