MIRACLE OF SURGERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 May 1940, Page 8

MIRACLE OF SURGERY

BOY’S LEG SAVED BY SKIN-GRAFTING. A boy eleven laid down his crutches and hobbled across the floor of the Annie Zunz ward in Westminster Hospital, writes a special correspondent of the “Sunday Express,’’ London. Watching, in a tense silence, were doctors, nurses and patients. It was a man lying propped up in bed who broke the silence . . . “The kid’s done it!” he laughed excitedly. Raymond Smart could walk. “It seems like a miracle,” said one sick man. And the boy just smiled. He knew that the 15. skin-grafting operations he had endured in 21 months had succeeded.

It meant that, after living almost all his life in hospitals, he could now go to school and play games like other children. Then Raymond was sent away to Hayling Island. Hampshire, to convalesce. A few weeks later he returned to London and was taken to the headquarters of the Royal Society of Medicine, in Wimpole Street, where an audience of medical men awaited him. The doctors heard a full description of the case, considered the most outstanding of its kind, and were shown photographs taken at stages of the boy’s treatment.

Raymond, whose home is at Chippenham, Wiltshire, was born with an open birthmark on his leg, which grew and grew. The medical term is sclerodermia.

Before he was five he was living in hospitals. While in Marlborough Hospital his parents, who are poor, cycled 40 miles every weekend to see him. He went to other hospitals throughout the country, and finally, four years ago. to Westminster. Early treatment had failed.

They talked of amputation, but strove desperately to avoid it. So they embarked on a fresh plan of grafting skin from the boy’s abdomen on to the leg. Now 21 patient months have been rewarded, months have been rewarded, months in which The Kid lived up to the nickname of “Sunshine Ray" he won through his bravery.