“A gift? What is the occasion?”
“Is this not the first anniversary of the Grand Opening of your medical practice?”
I nodded but the reminder almost made me cringe. My practice had not been much of a success.
“Congratulations,” Sherlock said.
“I am not at all sure congratulations are in order. This year has been neither profitable nor satisfying.”
“Times will change, Poppy,” he urged. “Just a few years ago, a medical school in England which allowed women to attend and obtain a medical degree was pure fantasy. Now, look at you. You have graduated. You are a medical doctor. You treat patients as a physician, not as a nurse or an apothecary.”
“A few patients, Sherlock,” I agreed, “but put emphasis on the word ‘few.’”
I untied the red ribbon and opened the box. I removed the trumpet-shaped wooden tube.
“A stethoscope?”
“When I visited your office last week, I noticed that yours was quite bent and worn.”
“It was second-hand.”
“Well, that,” he said, “is because you stubbornly refused to accept anything beyond the small loan you obtained from your uncle to commence your practice. However,” he added, pointing to the new one, “that should remedy one need. Will it suffice?”
“Yes, it’s perfect. Thank you so much.”
“Good. Did you know that a French physician invented the instrument so he could examine a very fat woman whose heart he could not hear when he pressed his ear to her chest? Necessity is the mother of invention. And I have just learned that a British scientist has used a galvanometer to measure electric impulses from the brains of animals.”
“Yes, Richard Caton,” I said.
“Quite right. Astounding. I think remarkable inventions are on the horizon, Poppy. I do wish I would live to see all the medical tools and scientific and forensic advancements that the next hundred years will bring.”
“Why, Mr. Holmes, don’t you plan to live forever?” I quipped.
“I do, of course. I should like to attain immortality. That would be quite the invention, wouldn’t it? At least my monographs will succeed me.”
He placed the stethoscope around my neck, took me by the arm, and without further conversation, he guided me to St. Bart’s mortuary.
As we walked, I stared at his gift, pondering how few times I had actually used any of the equipment in my medical office.
Female doctors were still not trusted or visited by most of the general public. Bart’s had a casualty ward, but I had not been able to convince anyone there to hire me to work in it nor had any of the other hospitals in London opened a triage department, a goal I had set for myself after Uncle Ormond and I had treated the injured at the site of the horrible train collision.
I was not the only female doctor who had been unsuccessful. Of the twenty-five young women who entered the freshman class at the London School of Medicine for Women, the first in Britain to open its door to women, only a handful graduated. It was not until the year I matriculated, in 1877, that an agreement was finally reached with the Royal Free Hospital to allow our students to complete their clinical studies there, so I thanked God every day for the experience I garnered under my uncle’s tutelage. Some of my classmates dropped out and became apothecaries. Some obtained a midwife’s degree from the Obstetrical Society. One woman, Alice Vickery, passed the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s examination. She became the first qualified female chemist and druggist. But there were only five women who were practicing medicine in the whole Kingdom, and we were not well received by the public.
Eventually things began to change, just as Sherlock said they would. Women in medicine and other professions earned respect. The roles of women began to move away from the stereotypes of the sad Lily Bart of The House of Mirth and most of the females portrayed in Little Women... we started to see as many ‘Jo’s as ‘Amy’s.’ The restlessness of even the most well-born of women was exposed by Nobel Prize winner Edith Wharton and other writers. But at the time, I was certain that Britain’s orthodoxy regarding gender was unyielding.
When we entered the morgue, Sherlock threw back the sheet that covered a man in his early forties. A dead man, of course.
“It’s a corpse.”
“Elementary, my dear Dr. Stamford.”
“You haven’t robbed any graves, have you?”
Knowing his propensity toward scientific methods and how studying the dead might impact solving crimes among the living, I put nothing past him.
“Fresh corpses are useful, to be sure, but I leave grave robbing to those still seeking profit as Resurrectionists.”
“I am glad to hear you have not resorted to that,” I said.
The so-called Resurrectionists - grave robbers with a fancy name - capitalized on the fact that dead bodies were much sought after by scientists and physicians for the study of human anatomy, so they commanded a premium price; seven to ten pounds each had once been the going rate. The best sources were mass graves or pits in which paupers were buried. Until the laws changed in 1820, it was an easy way to make money, almost as easy as the heinous baby-farming industry that still plagued the British Empire.
These most monstrous practices had endured, but fortunately, public outcry and new regulations had diminished both. Though bodies were certainly useful in the study of anatomy and physiology, particularly in medical schools, the law provided for cheap, legal cadavers by turning over to medical schools the bodies of those who died in caretaker institutions and prisons, thus discouraging grave robbers.
“This, Poppy,” Sherlock said, “is one of several men who have recently died under similar and suspicious circumstances. He died just twenty-four hours after the one who was reported in the newspaper today.”
“And... why have you called upon me, Sherlock?”
“Your uncle is out of town, lecturing in Scotland, is he not?”
Uncle Ormond was indeed in Edinburgh, lecturing to first-year medical students on the subject
