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"I was in practice at the time. One morning a
Mrs. Cooper called upon me and informed me that her
husband had shown signs of delusions lately. They
took the form of imagining that he had been in the
army and had distinguished himself very much. As a
matter of fact he was a lawyer and had never been out
of England. Mrs. Cooper was of opinion that if I
were to call it might alarm him, so it was agreed
between us that she should send him up in the evening
on some pretext to my consulting-room, which would
give me the opportunity of having a chat with him
and, if I were convinced of his insanity, of signing
his certificate. Another doctor had already signed,
so that it only needed my concurrence to have him
placed under treatment. Well, Mr. Cooper arrived in
the evening about half an hour before I had expected
him, and consulted me as to some malarious symptoms
from which he said that he suffered. According to
his account he had just returned from the Abyssinian
Campaign, and had been one of the first of the
British forces to enter Magdala. No delusion could
possibly be more marked, for he would talk of little
else, so I filled in the papers without the slightest
hesitation. When his wife arrived, after he had
left, I put some questions to her to complete the
form. `What is his age?' I asked. `Fifty,' said
she. `Fifty!' I cried. `Why, the man I
examined could not have been more than thirty!
And so it came out that the real Mr. Cooper had never
called upon me at all, but that by one of those
coincidences which take a man's breath away another
Cooper, who really was a very distinguished young
officer of artillery, had come in to consult me. My
pen was wet to sign the paper when I discovered it,"
says Dr. Manson, mopping his forehead.
"We were talking about nerve just now," observes
the surgeon. "Just after my qualifying I served in
the Navy for a time, as I think you know. I was on
the flag-ship on the West African Station, and I
remember a singular example of nerve which came to my
notice at that time. One of our small gunboats had
gone up the Calabar river, and while there the
surgeon died of coast fever. On the same day a man's
leg was broken by a spar falling upon it, and it
became quite obvious that it must be taken off above
the knee if his life was to be saved. The young
lieutenant who was in charge of the craft searched
among the dead doctor's effects and laid his hands
upon some chloroform, a hip-joint knife, and a volume
of Grey's Anatomy. He had the man laid by the
steward upon the cabin table, and with a picture of a
cross section of the thigh in front of him he began
to take off the limb. Every now and then, referring
to the diagram, he would say: `Stand by with
the lashings, steward. There's blood on the chart
about here.' Then he would jab with his knife until
he cut the artery, and he and his assistant would tie
it up before they went any further. In this way they
gradually whittled the leg off, and upon my word they
made a very excellent job of it. The man is hopping
about the Portsmouth Hard at this day.
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