This unsporting approach to surgery so annoyed me that one morning when Bingham was out of the casualty-room I felt justified in harvesting some of his crop myself. I was half-way through removing under local anaesthetic an interesting sebaceous cyst on the nose of an Underground ticket collector, when Bingham burst into the theatre.

'I say!' he started, his white coat flapping furiously. 'That cyst's bally well mine!'

I looked at him over my mask. 'Oh, is it?' I said in surprise. 'I thought you'd gone to lunch.'

'Lunch! Have you ever known me go to lunch during minor ops.? Of course I wasn't at lunch, you chump. I was having a dekko at a p.m.-jolly interesting ruptured kidney-and having a chat about it with the Prof., if you must know.'

'Well, there's plenty more,' I said, picking up the cyst in a pair of forceps. 'I'll be finished in five minutes.'

'That isn't the bally point,' he went on crossly. 'The fact is, old chap, I particularly wanted to do that cyst. I've been looking forward to it all morning. And I might add it's pretty unethical to pinch another chap's patients, old chap.'

'It's also pretty unethical for a chap to go round the streets of London touting for custom.'

He blushed. For a few seconds he said nothing. 'I don't think I like your tone, old chap,' he muttered.

'And I don't ruddy well care if you don't.'

The patient, now alarmed that his medical advisers were about to come to blows over his body, reminded them of their obligations with a noise through the sterile towels like the neigh of a dying horse.

'I'll report you to the Prof.,' Bingham hissed, and swept out.

He revenged himself immediately by directing all the 'old chronics' to my desk. These patients were a human sludge in the machinery of St Swithin's, of which it could never rid itself. They appeared regularly with notes as large as the score of a symphony, on which the words 'Rep. Mist.' were scrawled in the writing of twenty successive house surgeons. These abbreviations entitled them to another bottle of medicine, the original purpose of which was generally forgotten and the original prescriber probably dead.