brutality of the teaching, which makes use of the unwilling bodies
of sick people. "Not being able to pay for their treatment in
money, they have to pay with their bodies." Finally, the student
becomes a doctor himself. Full of faith and knowledge, he starts
practice in a small market-town of central Russia. But his work soon
cools him down; in the clinic he had studied mostly exceptional
cases; now he is disconcerted by simple and every-day sicknesses.
His ignorance leads to the following tragic case:

One day, a poor and widowed washerwoman brings him her sick child,
whom she does not want to take to the hospital because her two
oldest children died there. The child is a weak boy of eight years
who has caught scarlet-fever. At first, the inside of the throat
begins to swell, and, to prevent an abscess, the doctor orders
rubbings with a mercurial ointment. The next day, he finds the boy
all aquiver and covered with pimples. "There is no mistake," he
says, "the rubbing has spread the infection into the neighboring
organs and a general poisoning of the blood has taken place. The
little boy is lost.... All that day and night I wandered about the
streets. I could think of nothing, and I felt crushed by the horror
of the thing. Only at times this thought came into my mind: 'I have
killed a human being!'" The child lived ten days more. The night
before his death Veressayev comes to see him. The poor mother is
sobbing in a corner of the miserable room. She pulls herself
together, however, and taking three rubles out of her pocket, offers
them to the trembling doctor, who refuses them. Then this woman
falls down on her knees and thanks him for having pitied her son.
"I'll leave everything, I'll give up everything," sobs the
doctor.... "I have decided to leave for St. Petersburg to-morrow in
order to study some more even if I die of hunger!"

Once the resolution was made to pursue his studies in a more
practical manner, he becomes the house-surgeon of a hospital. But
even there a mass of problems disturb him. He sees how dangerous the
simplest operations are; he is frightened by the unrestraint of the
doctors, who try new methods on the sick, methods the effects of
which are not known, methods that result in the patient's being
inoculated with more sickness. Medicine cannot progress without
direct experimentation, and experience is gained at the expense of
the more unfortunate. Nevertheless, Veressayev does not argue
again