Philip accepts the interim position of southern doctor

Philip’s acceptance of a month-long locum with Doctor South in Farnley marks the transition from medical qualification to independent practice. Offered the post the day after receiving his diploma, he agrees to leave at once for three guineas a week with board and lodging. What begins as a short-term job for money becomes a practical education: Philip encounters a general practitioner whose methods challenge the hospital orthodoxy he has learned, gains responsibility among local patients, and forms an unexpectedly companionable relation with the doctor who had seemed likely to drive him away.

The Offer and Immediate Departure

The appointment comes just after Philip passes his final examination and receives his diploma, seven years after entering St. Luke’s Hospital. When he visits the hospital secretary to register for an appointment, the secretary offers him a month’s locum work on the south coast: three guineas a week, including board and lodging. The regular assistant has developed mumps, so the replacement is needed immediately. Philip accepts the terms and agrees to go that afternoon.

The timing suits his practical circumstances. He has no work arranged for the next few weeks and hopes to save money for a promised holiday in Spain, or to use the interval before another hospital appointment. He would have preferred a few days to himself, but sees no reason to delay. He has little luggage; after a quick departure, he arrives at Farnley shortly after seven and takes a cab to Doctor South’s house, a broad, low stucco building with Virginia creeper on it. The speed of the journey turns a provisional offer into a sudden change of setting and responsibility.

First Encounter with Doctor South

The introduction is deliberately unwelcoming. Doctor South is writing at his desk when Philip is shown into the consulting-room. He neither rises nor speaks, but simply stares; Philip has to explain that he is the locum expected after the hospital secretary’s telegram. The old doctor’s first practical response is to say that dinner has been held back and ask whether Philip wants to wash. Philip’s initial impression is that he has arrived to work for a funny old fellow, but the strangeness soon proves to have an institutional basis.

Doctor South distrusts much of the medicine developed during the previous thirty years. He dismisses fashionable drugs as passing enthusiasms, relies on stock mixtures he has used since his own student days at St. Luke’s, and treats antiseptic precautions with disdainful tolerance. Philip, by contrast, has been trained in a hospital where such precautions are insisted upon. Their disagreement is not simply about temperament: it stages a conflict between accumulated local experience and modern institutional training, as well as between a practitioner’s economy and the costly habits Doctor South associates with young hospital men.

Work, Errors, and Mutual Testing

Doctor South’s suspicion of his assistants has a history. In his view, young doctors arrive with theoretical knowledge, unbounded self-confidence, and contempt for general practice, yet may be helpless with ordinary complaints. He objects to expensive prescriptions for a fisherman with a stomach-ache and faults young medical men for poor reading, handwriting, and spelling. For the first two or three days he watches Philip closely, prepared to seize on a mistake and answer it with acid sarcasm.

Philip makes mistakes. Having never seen measles before, he mistakes the rash for an obscure skin disease; on other occasions his treatment differs from Doctor South’s. The first time the old doctor attacks him, however, Philip takes the criticism in good humour and answers with enough wit to make Doctor South pause. Philip’s face remains grave while his eyes twinkle, leaving the older man unsure whether he is being mocked. Doctor South considers sending him away by the next train, as he has dismissed earlier assistants, but suspects Philip would only laugh. His anger gives way to amusement: he finds himself smiling, then recognizes that Philip is systematically teasing him. The encounter begins to shift from surveillance and challenge into a private contest whose pleasure neither man openly announces.

The change also reflects Philip’s own response to the work. He likes the independence and responsibility of the locum, and he is pleased to follow patients through treatment rather than encounter illness only at intervals in a hospital ward. His rounds lead him into low-roofed cottages containing fishing gear and reminders of sailors’ journeys—objects from Japan, Melanesia, and the bazaars of Stamboul among them. When Philip avoids condescension, the sailors tell him stories of their travels. His attention to patients and their homes extends medical practice beyond diagnosis: he finds interest in the people who bring their illnesses to him and in the lives around those illnesses.

Recognition, Vulnerability, and Significance

The locum’s professional independence has a personal edge. In a later exchange at dinner, Doctor South asks Philip whether a remark about his game leg stung. Philip answers that people bring up the weakness directly or indirectly whenever they become angry with him. Doctor South observes that they probably know it is his weak point. The question makes explicit that Philip’s disability remains available as a weapon in ordinary social conflict, even as he is becoming capable and assured in his professional role. His growing ease at Farnley does not erase that vulnerability; it allows the subject to be acknowledged between men who have learned to read one another.

A separate dinner moment reveals another side of their developing regard. Doctor South asks why Philip looked at the sunset, and Philip says he did so because he was happy. The old doctor gives him an odd look, then shows a brief flicker of a smile. They eat the rest of the meal in silence before Doctor South raises the question of Philip’s leg. The sequence places uncomplicated happiness, guarded affection, and knowledge of an old hurt in the same domestic exchange. Doctor South does not become a sentimental mentor, and Philip’s short appointment does not settle their differences over medicine. Its importance lies instead in the work that makes their differences productive: a young doctor is tested in practice, while an irascible employer discovers that this assistant can withstand his attacks without either submission or open hostility.