The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry

Author:Ambrose Parry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Eight

No. 52 Queen Street was in a strange state of suspension. Raven sat by a window in the drawing room, Professor Christison’s Treatise on Poisons weighing heavily upon his lap, while George Keith and James Duncan were perched either side of the fireplace, also poring over papers and books. The house was unsettlingly quiet and still for this time of the morning, nothing functioning according to normal manner. For the second day, the morning clinic had been cancelled, and everyone was quite at a loss as to how they ought to occupy themselves.

Breakfast had been served without Dr Simpson arriving to say grace, which indicated that the staff knew not to expect him. Upon returning from Albyn Place the previous morning, he had taken to his bed and had not emerged since. Mrs Simpson had joined them but briefly today in the dining room, eating a few mouthfuls of toast before withdrawing again without speaking a word.

All was silent but for the crackling of the fire and the occasional shriek from the parrot. Nonetheless, despite the absence of distraction, Raven was not making any headway in finding a possible cause of Evie and Rose’s apparent agonies.

Raven became aware that Duncan had closed the volume before him and was gazing thoughtfully in his direction. This was seldom the overture to anything good.

‘Tackling Christison, eh?’ he said. ‘An excellent resource, incontestably, but as physicians we must all take care not to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’

Ordinarily Raven would not have encouraged him to expand, but right then he was content to be drawn away from the labour of his fruitless search.

‘What do you mean?’

‘One could argue that all poison is essentially an overdose. For surely there are properties in everything mentioned in Christison that may be beneficial in the right measure, or that may induce an effect we can harness in the patient’s interest.’

‘Yes, but establishing the relationship between dose and effect is fraught with difficulty. Speaking as one who has been exposed to all manner of foul vapours after dinner most evenings.’

‘Yes, but through such endeavours, posterity might at least find a footnote for you in medical history,’ Duncan replied.

Keith smirked at this, which provoked a smile from Duncan. Raven strongly suspected the latter did not appreciate which of the pair the former had been amused by.

Raven was less inclined towards levity; he regarded the on-going testing model as a catastrophe in the making. Simpson had every professor and chemist of his acquaintance on the lookout for prospective compounds that might exhibit anaesthetic properties. Any time one of them identified a new one, they would bring a sample to the house and it would be tested after dinner by all of the medical men present. Professor Miller, the surgeon who lived next door at No. 51, had taken to dropping in most mornings on his way to the Infirmary just to make sure everyone had survived the night. So far, nothing they tested had provoked anything more dramatic

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