Read Online A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov - Free Book Online Page B

round at the white and bloodstained disorder, at the red water in the basin and felt that I had won. But somewhere deep down there wriggled a worm of doubt.
    â€˜Let’s wait and see what happens now,’ I said.
    Anna Nikolaevna turned to look at me in astonishment.
    â€˜What can happen? Everything’s all right.’
    I mumbled something vague in reply. What I had meant to say was to wonder whether the mother was really safe and sound, whether I might not have done her some harm during the operation … the thought nagged dully at my mind. My knowledge of obstetrics was so vague, so fragmentary and bookish. What about a rupture? How would it show? And when would it show—now or, perhaps, later? Better not talk about that.
    â€˜Well, almost anything,’ I said. ‘The possibility of infection cannot be ruled out,’ I added, repeating the first sentence from some textbook that came into my mind.
    â€˜Oh, tha-at,’ Anna Nikolaevna drawled complacently. ‘Well, with luck nothing of that sort will happen. How could it, anyway? Everything here is clean and sterile.’
    It was after one o’clock when I went back to my room. In a pool of light on the desk in my study lay Döderlein open at the page headed ‘Dangers of Version’. For another hour after that, sipping my cooling tea, I sat over it, turning the pages. And an interesting thing happened: all the previously obscure passages became entirely comprehensible, as though they had been flooded with light; and there, at night, under the lamplight in the depth of the countryside I realised what real knowledge was.
    â€˜One can gain a lot of experience in a country practice,’ I thought as I fell asleep, ‘but even so one must go on and on reading, reading … more and more …’

THE SPECKLED RASH
    â€˜THIS IS IT!’ INTUITION PROMPTED ME. NO NEED to rely on my knowledge; as a doctor only six months qualified, I had none. Afraid to touch the man’s bare, warm shoulder (though there was nothing to fear), I said to him from where I stood:
    â€˜Just move nearer to the light, would you?’
    He turned the way I wanted him to, and the light of the kerosene pressure-lamp shone on his yellow-tinged skin. A white, speckled rash showed through the yellow colouring of his flanks and bulging chest. ‘Like stars in the sky,’ I thought to myself with a chill of fear as I bent down to his chest. Then I drew my eyes away from it and up to his face. Before me was a man of about forty with an untidy, ashen-grey beard and bright little eyes under swollen lids. To my great amazement I saw in those eyes a look of dignity and a sense of his own importance. Bored and indifferent, he blinked occasionally as he adjusted the belt of his trousers.
    â€˜This is it—syphilis,’ I repeated grimly to myself. This was my first professional encounter with it, as I had been flung straight from university into a remote village.
    I stumbled on this case of syphilis by chance. The patient had come to me complaining of a congested throat. All unawares, without a thought of syphilis, I had told him to get undressed, and only then did I see the speckled rash.
    Putting all the symptoms together—his hoarseness,the sinister inflammation of his throat, the strange white patches on it and his mottled chest—I guessed at the trouble. My first, cowardly reaction was to rub my hands with a ball of sublimate of mercury. The minute it took to do this was poisoned by the anxious thought that he might have coughed on my hands. Then weakly and squeamishly I rolled a glass spatula in my hands and inspected my patient’s throat with it. Where should I put the spatula? I decided to place it on a wad of cotton wool on the window ledge.
    â€˜Well now,’ I said, ‘you see … er … it seems … in fact it’s quite certain … you see, you have a rather