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- CHAPTER LXI.
THE SURGEON OF THE FLEET.
Cadwallader Cuticle, M. D., and Honorary Member of the most
distinguished Colleges of Surgeons both in Europe and America, was our
Surgeon of the Fleet. Nor was he at all blind to the dignity of his
position; to which, indeed, he was rendered peculiarly competent, if
the reputation he enjoyed was deserved. He had the name of being the
foremost Surgeon in the Navy, a gentleman of remarkable science, and a
veteran practitioner.
He was a small, withered man, nearly, perhaps quite, sixty years of
age. His chest was shallow, his shoulders bent, his pantaloons hung
round skeleton legs, and his face was singularly attenuated. In truth,
the corporeal vitality of this man seemed, in a good degree, to have
died out of him. He walked abroad, a curious patch-work of life and
death, with a wig, one glass eye, and a set of false teeth, while his
voice was husky and thick; but his mind seemed undebilitated as in
youth; it shone out of his remaining eye with basilisk brilliancy.
Like most old physicians and surgeons who have seen much service, and
have been promoted to high professional place for their scientific
attainments, this Cuticle was an enthusiast in his calling. In private,
he had once been heard to say, confidentially, that he would rather cut
off a man’s arm than dismember the wing of the most delicate pheasant.
In particular, the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love;
and in his state-room below he had a most unsightly collection of
Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all imaginable
malformations of the human members, both organic and induced by
disease. Chief among these was a cast, often to be met with in the
Anatomical Museums of Europe, and no doubt an unexaggerated copy of a
genuine original; it was the head of an elderly woman, with an aspect
singularly gentle and meek, but at the same time wonderfully expressive
of a gnawing sorrow, never to be relieved. You would almost have
thought it the face of some abbess, for some unspeakable crime
voluntarily sequestered from human society, and leading a life of
agonised penitence without hope; so marvellously sad and tearfully
pitiable was this head. But when you first beheld it, no such emotions
ever crossed your mind. All your eyes and all your horrified soul were
fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn,
like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead, and partly
shadowing the face; but as you gazed, the freezing fascination of its
horribleness gradually waned, and then your whole heart burst with
sorrow, as you contemplated those aged features, ashy pale and wan. The
horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and
committed before the spirit had entered the flesh. Yet that sin seemed
something imposed, and not voluntarily sought; some sin growing out of
the heartless necessities of the predestination of things; some sin
under which the sinner sank in sinless woe.
But no pang of pain, not the slightest touch of concern, ever crossed
the bosom of Cuticle when he looked on this cast. It was immovably
fixed to a bracket, against the partition of his state-room, so that it
was the first object that greeted his eyes when he opened them from his
nightly sleep. Nor was it to hide the face, that upon retiring, he
always hung his Navy cap upon the upward curling extremity of the horn,
for that obscured it but little.
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