STUDENTS' DUELS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 145, 23 June 1930, Page 15

STUDENTS' DUELS

"MENSUR" ATTACKED

DOCTORS IN DEFENCE

The student due!, which leaves proud, if unsightly, scars on the faces of so many university men in Germany, is threatened by legislation, but it has found a wholehearted and powerful defender in the German Surgical Association, says the "Daily jTelegraph.".: This body has issued a.formal declaration pronouncing the "mensur," as it is called, to bo but the least dangerous of sports. It should be understood that the combatants in the niensur are protected in all their vital and essential parts by goggles, gauntlets of chain mail, broad leather pads, and mattress-like quilted wrappings. They face one another in fixed positions, from which they are not permitted to budge, and, as a rule, the arms must be kept extended and only the wrists may be used in the manipulation of the sabre. The cheeks and chin are practically the only portions of the body which are both unprotected and within reach of the adversary's weapon. They suffer- accordingly. in a case in which the mensur had fatal results the Supreme Court treated it as

duelling, and consequently as punishable. This decision does not seem to have affected its vogue, and efforts are now being made to have it specifically penalised by the New Criminal Code at present before the Keichstag Committee. . ' The manifesto of the surgeons declares, however, that the sabres with which these contests are earned out are not "lethal weapons," if the prescribed precautions are taken, and that the mensur is to be regarded not as a "duel," but as "a fighting game" or a "fighting sport." The injuries inflicted by the sabre, it is said, as much less dangerous than those resulting from the fist in boxiug, "as is clearly shown by a: comparison of the numbers of fatalities and permanent injuries in the two fighting games."

Moreover, the fatalities of the mensur are" almost invariably indirect consequences, caused by blood poisoning or secondary hemorrhage, whereas deaths in the boxing ring are caused directly by fractures of the skull or shock. Indeed, the surgeons go further than this and maintain that mountaineering, swimming, riding, and football "are undoubtedly all much more dangerous than the mensur."