A Burnt Out Case
“He had made the drawing himself; the cards he had ordered in Luc because he despaired of obtaining any like them from home. The trouble was they cost too little; the invoices had fallen like fine dust through the official tray that sifted his requests for aid. There was nobody on the lower levels of the Ministry at home with authority to allow an expenditure of six hundred francs, and nobody with courage enough to worry a senior officer with such a paltry demand. Now whenever he used the charts he felt irritated by his own bad drawings. He ran his fingers over a patient’s back and detected a new thickening of the skin below the left shoulder-blade. He drew the shading on his chart and called, ‘Next.’ Perhaps he might have forestalled that patch if the new hospital had been finished and the new apparatus installed for taking the temperature of the skin. ‘It is not a case of what I have done,’ he thought, ‘but of what I am going to do.’ This optimistic phrase had an ironic meaning for D...octor Colin.MoreLess
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