WONDERS OF WAR SURGERY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 1936, 6 February 1919, Page 4

WONDERS OF WAR SURGERY.

SOME OF THE NEWEST FEATS

Colonel Pierre Duval, of (he. French Reserve Medical Corps, who is at Port Oglethorpe, Georgia, with ten of the foremost British, French, and Italian surgeons to attend the Inter-Allied Surgical Congress, described some almost incredible war operations to 1,200 medical officers of the American Army at Camp Green leaf. “After the Battle of the Somme," said Colonel Duval, “records were kept of 300 lung cases treated medically. Twenty-eight per cent, of (he men died. Of a similar number treated surgically only 81 per cent, died. Doctors need no longer have fear of culling into the chest cavity ami performing the most delicate operation. “War-time surgery has completely done, away with old-time notions. We have entered upon a new era of medical science.” Among the new wonders of surgery demonstrated to the assembled doctors was (lie .use of a rubber balloon employed as a stoppage to tlie c.hesl cavity after a major operation. Professor Raffaclla Basliaiiclli. professor of surgery at the University of Rome, showed how this bag might lie inserted into the chest cavity and then inflated to prevent infected air from entering the dies!, walls. According to Professor Bas(iandli, (his new device may be used to patch up a wounded man, much as a motorist uses a rubber plug to patch it]) a leaking tyre.