Rab & His Friends.

This memorial is in Saint Mungo's Church Yard, Penicuik.
The inscription underneath the dog's head is as the title. Underneath that it reads:
"SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF 'THE HOWGATE CARRIER' AND HIS WIFE 'AILIE' WHO LIE BURIED IN THIS CHURCH YARD".
There was a short story written by Doctor John Brown of Biggar in 1859 which chronicled (presumably accurately) the details of the incident. The carrier, Jamie Noble, and his wife, Ailie, were obviously devoted and Rab, the huge bull mastiff was Jamie's constant companion. One day, the three of them turned up at an Edinburgh Hospital, presumably the old Royal Infirmary, with Ailie being in extreme pain from an advanced breast cancer, Brown refers it to his superior who decides to operate the following day. Both Jamie and Rab are present in the operating theatre to comfort Ailie who bears the surgery with fortitude only to die of septicaemia four days - these are the days before either hygiene or anaesthetics. The carrier loses the will to live and dies shortly afterwards.

While the poor woman was obviously not going to live very long, I find the futility of the treatment appalling when palliative care could have been available.

It was Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis working in Vienna at about the same time who realised the significance of cleanliness; his ideas were ridiculed and he died and outcast in a mental institution.

I read recently (I'm afraid I can't remember the source but it was probably "New Scientist") that it was not until the advent of penicillin in the 1940s that medical science started to extend human life more than it reduced it.