MAGAZINE EDITION

CONTRIBUTORS

BACK ISSUES

CONTACTS

UP GENERAL PRACTICE!!

By Peter Murchie
Contact the author by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

Medicus Marcus Infelix was not happy. His morning chirurgia had overrun and a so-called emergency at the Gladiatorial schola had detained him most inconveniently.

What was it with these gladiators? They didn’t seem able to put up with anything any more - so bloody demanding! This morning a huge Nubian whining and moaning, just because his left hand had been severed by old Marcinius. What a fuss over a flesh wound! And the screaming when he had applied the cautery fresh from the brazier. Fit for an Egyptian princess. Added to that, he’d had to curtail lunch without even one visit to the vomitarium. A bag of starlings’ tongues was hardly going to keep body and soul together, he thought gloomily as he wrestled with his toga, already several degrees of the sun-dial late for the practice conventus.

Increasingly agitated, he dodged through the chariots heading out onto Via Romana. He paused only to extend and waggle index and forefinger at a fat Cappadocian in a chariot whose slave angrily blared a bugle as their conveyance swerved to avoid him, throwing up a spray of fresh elephant dung over the virginal togas of two strolling senators. “Thanks be for Hannibal!” exulted Marcus gleefully, as the two waddling politicos gesticulated and peppered the air with vivid rhetorical tropes, the African pachyderms’ poo-poo dripping from them like a minor flumen.

Their wine and boar fed corpulence brought to mind his senior partner who would doubtless be sitting huffily awaiting him, all perfume and pomposity, still pink from his morning in the bath-house. To say that Medicus Nobious Maximus and Medicus Infelix were hardly Castor and Pollux was to profoundly understate the mutual animosity between the two men. Maximus’s tyrannical hold of their chirurgia’s purse strings and his tendency to ensure that his partners nobly bore their fasces whilst personally shouldering a lighter burden brewed a simmering resentment. “Memoro tu” thought Infelix, his recent decision to appoint his own horse as chirurgia manager and constant fiddle playing during the recent auctoramentum negotiations with the imperial treasurer had caused the other partners to contact the defence tribune. The omens were not particularly good.

Now almost half an hora late, he ran between the Corinthian columns of the chirurgia’s main portico. He paused and looked at his hands. “Mars!” he breathed, noting that they were still caked with gladiator’s blood. He ran quickly to the washroom to ablute before facing his colleagues at the conventus. He could almost hear Maximus’s whining, nasal tones raised in castigation as he entered the curia conventus.

“Why such haste, noble Marcus?” Infelix was startled by the booming voice of his colleague, Medicus Petrus Rotundus, as he passed through the washroom curtain. Infelix immediately relaxed. Save for Maximus and Gaius Insipidus, all of his colleagues were gathered around the main fons aqua.

“Oh, that’s a relief,” laughed Infelix. “I thought I’d missed it.”

“You did, my boy, you did,” chortled Rotundus, raising a red stained hand to point through to the curia beyond. There, on the pavimentum, lay the gory corpse of Maximus. Infelix gasped with delight, just as Medicus Gaius Insipidus entered bearing a bloody bundle.

“Greetings, Marcus,” said Insipidus. Then to Rotundus, “What shall I do with the practice daggers, Petrus?”

“Oh, wash them up and put them away until next time,” chuckled Rotundus

It was only then that some of Infelix’s delight receded, to be replaced with mild irritation. This was the second assassination of a senior partner that he had missed. He had only participated in three! Togas changed, hands washed, and bloody deeds complete, the medicos headed off for their busy post meridians. They would meet later that night for a celebratory orgy at Rotundus’s villa.

Infelix’s post meridian got off to a bad start. His first patient was Lady Livia Dolorfundus, wife of a local cochineal merchant. Infelix noted a distinct bubbling within his own black bile as he patiently explained for the XIVth time the phlegmatic deficiency which was producing her interminable myasthenia. How many times did he have to tell her that there was nothing he could do! When she compared him unfavourably once more to that stinking druid who dispensed his noxious nostrums by the Herculaneum gate, he narrowly avoided a plethoric eruption. If old Quackherbafix was as wonderful as all these women claimed, what with the time, and the sympathy and the magic, then why did they still feel in necessary to tax him and his hard won humoural theory.

His next patient brought no balm. Senator Rectummagnus’s piles were in the ascendancy again. Saturn was clutching at his heart as he left his chirurgia to fetch the appropriate lancet from the indentured practice matron. Returning, as he passed the practice atrium, he heard Lady Livia haranguing head reception slave Lurcio about her next appointment.

“Next Wednesday, 2.30. I need it! I simply need it!”she whined

“So do I, missus, but I can’t always get it,” retorted Lurcio, albeit sotto voce.

Infelix chortled inwardly. His mood brightened momentarily. That slave! The best 50 sesterti the chirurgia had ever spent. Infelix looked at the sundial. 3pm. Actually, not much more left of this interminable duty day. He looked forward with relish to Rotundus’s orgy.

It was at this point that Infelix noticed a strange intensification of the minor tremors of which he had been aware all day. For most of the morning he had attributed them to the surfeit of larks’ gall bladders and Gaulish wine which he had enjoyed the previous night during an evening of riotous entertainment provided by the pharmacy merchant. Now he was certain they were not of him. He became distracted by a distinct sulphurous tint to the air.

He looked down with distaste at the prone endomorphic senator, buttocks offered to Apollo. He reached for the amphora of rose water he used to scent his room on such occasions. Senator Rectummagnus truly was a man of contrasts. His golden logic and sparkling rhetoric might coruscate in the warm air of the forum, but he had a back passage like the portal of the underworld. But these odious zephyrs! They had the force of a charging Germanic horde breaking clear of the forest. Choking, eyes streaming, he turned and feinted, wielding his amphora like a gladiator in the arena.

It was as he passed the chirurgia window that he chanced to look out, just in time to see the top of Mount Vesuvius explode. This awesome sight absolved the noble senator of blame, but did not bode well for Infelix’s keenly anticipated evening of carnal pleasure. With considerable chagrin he contemplated the likely outcome. He had no doubt that the heralds were already scurrying from Pompdocs H bringing his orders to report for emergency duty…..Oh meus deus!

With profundus apologies to Robert Harris and true Latin scholars everywhere.

Other hoolet online articles by Peter Murchie can be found at:
hoolet edition 49 - Sandyjim Saves the Day
hoolet edition 48 - And The Winner Is...
hoolet edition 47 - A Christmas Caper
hoolet edition 46 - The Edinburgh Festival
hoolet edition 45 - Struck By Enlightenment
hoolet edition 44 - The Pendleton Code
hoolet edition 43 - Christmas Eve at The Pole
hoolet edition 42 - An Unexpected Reunion
hoolet edition 41 - The Complementary Garage
hoolet edition 40- Up General Practice!!
hoolet edition 39- Ten Years From Now
hoolet edition 38 - Finlay and the Contract Summit
hoolet edition 37 - Johnny the Bow and the New Contract
hoolet edition 36 - Science For Football's Sake
hoolet edition 35 - Evidence-Based Golfing
hoolet edition 34 - Dr. Marlowe

hoolet is the magazine of RCGP Scotland. It is supported intellectually, financially and emotionally by RCGP Scotland.

This issue maintained by Robert Hallam.