BRAVING DISEASE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 379, 14 November 1932, Page 2

BRAVING DISEASE

A DOCTOR'S DUTY mArtyrs to cause of science and medicine VICTORIES OF PEACE There are times when a doctor has to step within the very portals of death. Every doctor worth his -salt • has time and time again in his practice flirted with death. They do not do it conscionsly or directly for humanity's sake, for a few are philanthropists or altruists. . No one. will say that among their number there are not choice spirits who love their profession chiefly because it places within their hands the power to relieve the suffering and restore the crippled or maimed. Nor can it be denied that in their ranks there are some who have chosen the healing profession solely because it can lever then into higher social position or may prove the most lucrative of callings. Of such stuff the heroes of medicine or surgery are not made. That is natural, for noble deeds can scarcely emerge where the motive is ignorable. Let us turn to the others, happily the great majority. What, then, is it that makes medical men risk death? It is that they have sworn life-long allegiance to the art of healing, whether in the practice of their profession or in the science of their laborities. "Ars longa, vita brevis," is their motto. The art of medicine is eternal, and they are willing slaves to it, so that they may every make it more glorious in its achievements for the humaii race. Personal lucre or advan'cement is nothing compared with that.

The Physician's Prayer This spirit has noble expression in the Physician's Prayer attributed to the ancient Greek physician, Maimonides: — - Give me frugality beyond all, exeept in the great Art of Medicine. Never awaken in me the notion that I know enough. Oh, give me strength and zeal to enlarge my knowledge and to attain ever to more. Our art is great ; the mind of man presses forward ever." So we go hlithly into danger, and the reward is that most of us lead a charmed life. But alas! Some do not, writes a correspondent in the "Johannesburg Star." All of us have heard of the devoted medical men who shut them selves up in leper settlements and contracted the disease. I myself have n relative, still happily alive, in such a uost.

Sir Henry Head, the great nerve speeialist, the greatest living authority on paralysis, deliberately had the nerves of one forearm severed at the elbow, so that he might record firsthand the symptons and so advance our knowledge on the subject of deep sensibility. Now he himself is a helpless victim of creeping paralysis. There as a metaowinetaoietaoinnnnn Now take- the infectious fevers. There was the medical missionary, Dr. Jackson, who when the bubonic was at Mukden, China worked night and day until, at last utterly worn out, he himself succumbed to it. And in order that his nurses should not catch it, he forbade anyone to nurse him. There are many other instances of medical martyrs to the plague. "Just Land'ing Him" Similar to this is the case of Dr. Adrian Stokes. He went to West Africa to study yellow fever on the spot. He wrote: "We have our fish hooked. It is just a matter of landing him, only a matter of time, unless our taekle breaks." Alas! the tackle did break, or rather the fisher himself was submerged in the river of death. It may be remembered that "Martin Arrowsmith," the novel by Sinclair Lewis obtained the Nobel prize for literature, had for its hero a worker in a jsimilar field, but the victim was his wife, and, despite his protests, had insisted on aceompanying him. There are even cases on record not only of research doctors but also their students, having subjected their own bodies to the bites of the yellow fever and malaria mosquitoes, or disease bearing insects, in order that doubtful points might be cleared up. A French Hero But there is no greater hero in the history of medicine than the French physician of last century, Laennec, who is beter known as the orignator of the stethoscope. He himself had consumption of the lungs which he know would bring him to ari untimely death. He was poor, often in very sore straits. Yet he deliberately devoted what years of life might remain to him to the study of consumption, and struggled on in poverty and ill-health, seeking, not to win f ame or gold, but simply that he might leave to mankind the secret of the cure. It was left to Robert Koch to crown his work, but I think that in our hearts no one has a warmer place than poor heroic Laennec. Many a man could not have brought himself to peer into the ravages of other folk's bodies eaused by the disease he carried in his own. Laennec was its daily companion, till in the forties it claimed him for its own.