NO SLEEP FOR 15 YEARS

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 447, 1 June 1937, Page 3

NO SLEEP FOR 15 YEARS

EX-SOLDIER’S CASE . After Effects Of Gas Attack London, May 15. John Lewis Marchant, forty-three-year-old ex-soldier, of Walton-on-Thames celebrated his asthma cure by the purchase of a bed. When ho walked into a new clinic for lung disease at Slough, Buckinghamshire, he had not put his head on a pillow since he contracted asthma after a gas attack during the last war. To lie down meant to die. Worse still, his nerves had been so shattered that he never felt tired, never wanted to sleep, and worked twentyfour hours a day.

“But I soon realised that this could come in very useful,” he said this week as he lay in a cosy, vapour-filled ward of the clinic, where his old commander, General Sir Hubert Gough, was visiting him.

“I opened a motor repair shop, and part of my special service was to repair lorries during the night so that owners could have them first thing lit the morning. “I spent a small fortune on cures, and had given myself up as incurable when I heard of this new clinic. After only three weeks’ treatment, I went to sleep for the first time.” The treatment was invented by an American chemist, Mr David Fingard, who .rather than commercialise fils Invention, refused an offer of £lOO,0»».