MAKING NEW MEN

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3258, 3 May 1943, Page 7

MAKING NEW MEN

AUSTRALIAN HOSPITAL REVIVING THE WOUNDED Somewhere in Australia is a hospital to which the sorely wounded are rushed from New Guinea and the Solomons, and when the war is over, medical men will read its history as if it were a romance.

A pilot parachuted oyer New Guinea, fractured six ribs, punctured a lung and dislocated a shoulder. He tugged his shoulder back into position by pulling it. on the branch of a tree. Then he wandered for 20 days and his only food was grass.

For four days his lung bled, and he was greatly troubled by a dislocation of the joint where the breastbone and collarbone meet. He lost 451 b in weight. ‘-When finally he was rushed to hospital he was a mere skeleton,” the Chief of the Surgical Services (Major J. Dolce, of Buffalo) said. “But he is as good as ever now.” In another case an American soldier was considered to have no chance of survival when he was brought to the hospital with a bullet wound in the liver. •

The bullet went right through the liver and .stomach, but the patient was stitched up satisfactorily, and today is demanding to be allowed to return to the front line.

More than 1000 cases have gone through the operating rooms, and many thousands more have been treated in the wards. Deaths have totalled only three. Despite the terrific pressure under’ which the surgeons have worked after the different great battles in the Pacific area, they have performed operations whose ingenuity will stagger other doctors if ever they are recorded in medical journals.