The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(39)
“We were friends when we were children,” I explain. “We grew up together.”
“In England? What did you say your name was?”
“Felicity Montague.”
He takes a sip of the whiskey, regarding me over the rim, then hooks his foot around a stool and pulls it in front of him. “Come sit down.” I take a tentative seat, and he tips his glass at me. “Care for a drink?” When I shake my head, he takes another sip and says, “Why do you want to study medicine, Miss Montague? It’s not a passion one sees in many young ladies.”
I may not have gotten to use my answers on the Saint Bart’s board, but I’ve got them ready. I reach into my pocket before I can stop myself and pull out that battered list, now folded and unfolded so many times in varying states of dampness that I can hardly read the words overlapping the creases.
“First,” I start, but Platt cuts me off.
“What’s that? Do you have to read off a paper to remember your own heart?”
I raise my head. “Oh, no, sir, I just had this prepared for—”
“Give it here; let me see.” He holds out a hand, and I surrender my list, biting back the temptation to snatch it back in embarrassment of both my penmanship and earnestness. Platt scans the list with a loud sip from his glass. Then he sets both glass and list upon the end table and begins fishing in his coat pocket. “None of this will get you taken seriously by physicians in London.”
“Sir?”
“All this nonsense about women contributing to the field? No one will listen to that argument. Don’t even mention you’re a woman. No one wants to hear about women. Act as though it’s no barrier and that you, as you so appropriately say, deserve to be here.” He finds a pencil nub in his jacket and crosses out my first point. I feel an actual lurch in my stomach when his pencil makes violent contact with the paper, like he’s scrubbing out part of my soul. “And while I appreciate the naming here, so what if you can read and write Latin, French, and German? Any idiot with an Eton education can do more. They don’t want to hear that, they want to see it in the way you carry yourself. The way you speak.” He makes a note, then his eyes flit down the list, one brow arching. “Did you really mend an amputated finger?”
“Yes, sir. My friend—”
“Lead in with that,” he interrupts, scrawling the point at the top of my paper. “Experience is everything. Say it is one of many instances, even if it is not. And tell them you’ll work for free, and harder than anyone else, even if it isn’t true. None of this nonsense about lady surgeons in history. You can’t name a lady surgeon from history because there aren’t any that matter to these men. You need to talk about Paracelsus and Antonio Benivieni and Galen—”
“Galen?” I laugh before I can help it, then immediately clap my hands over my mouth, horrified that I have just laughed in the face of Dr. Alexander Platt. But he looks up from my paper with a curious expression, and I press on. “He’s a man who wrote about the body without ever making an actual study of one. Half his theories were disproved by Vesalius and no one even took the time to prove the rest wrong because they’re so obviously idiotic. Paracelsus burned his books. Who reads Galen anymore?”
“Clearly not you.” Platt presses his fingers together, my paper between them. “You favor human dissection, then?”
“Strongly,” I reply. “Though particularly when that dissection is used in conjunction with your school of discovering the cause rather than the cure.”
“Ha. I didn’t know anyone thought of it as a school.” He makes another note on my paper. “Had you been granted hospital education, you would have found my theories as disregarded as Galen’s.”
“Prevention would decrease the business of hospitals and make it more difficult for them to exploit the poor, so I understand why they will not invest in it. With all due respect to the hospital boards in London.” I pause, then add, “Actually, no. No respect is due to them, because they’re all asses.”
He stares at me, and I fear I’ve spoken too boldly, but then he laughs, a burst like a bullet through glass. “No wonder those toffs in London didn’t like you. Where did you find all these opinions?”
“I didn’t find them, I formulated them,” I say. “From reading your books. And others.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and I’m suddenly very aware of the fact that it’s just the pair of us, talking alone in a library at night. Which sounds far more like a scene from the amatory novels I used to pretend to read than the medical texts I was actually studying.
Platt wipes the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “You’re lucky the hospitals didn’t admit you. You’d be better off getting a venereal disease instead of a practical education. They’ll both make you unsuitable for jobs and undesirable to men.” He looks at me like he’s expecting me to laugh at that, but the best I can offer is not frowning. Perhaps I have placed too much hope in Dr. Platt being entirely divorced from the notion of a woman’s primary value being how much she’s desired.
“The hospital schools in London are populated by the sons of rich men whose fathers pay for them to sleep through their lectures and skip hospital rounds,” he goes on. “And then buy their way into the guilds. You would have been wasted there.”