ATOMIC ENERGY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26640, 10 December 1947, Page 4

ATOMIC ENERGY

APPLICATION TO CANCER RESEARCH OTAGO SURGEON’S VIEWS Atomic energy, which, as a war potential, hangs over the world like a fateful cloud, may be a valuable asset in the fight of medical science against the scourge of cancer, according to a former Cromwell resident, Dr D. VV. Jolly, who is now on the staff of the Royal Cancer Hospital, London. “ If nations will refrain from blowing one another to bits and we have a period of peace, there is no doubt that we can learn a great deal from radio-active elements. This is a period of hope for advances in the realm of physiology and, in consequence, pathology,” he said in an interview with the Daily Times yesterday. War service and travel have occupied a great deal of Dr Jolly’s time since he graduated at Otago University in 1929. He is at present on a fourmonths’ visit to the Dominion and expects to fly back to England early in March. The last time Dr Jolly was in New Zealand was in 1939 when he toured the country giving lectures to raise funds for Spanish civil war refugees. His qualifications for this task were obvious as. during 1936 and 1937, he served with the Republican forces in

Spain as a medical officer, seeing a great deal of active service. When war broke out he returned to London rather than enlist- here as he was anxious to complete a book he was writing about surgery in the Spanish war. He joined the British Army in 1940 and became lieutenant-colonel in charge of the surgical division of a British General Hospital. From July, 1941, he was with the Eighth Army, and it was not until early last year that he was demobilised. Dr Jolly mentioned the fact that he had been privileged to see the results of the first use of penicillin on wounded soldiers. He was in command of one of the three surgical hospitals in Tripoli at a time when wounded were being shipped from Sicily for treatment in the North African town. “ Penicillin was tried out there with great success, and its use has, of course, been developed since then on a tremendous scale,” he said.