A DOCTOR'S NOTEBOOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 135, 23 January 1942, Page 12

A DOCTOR'S NOTEBOOK

MORE NOTES FROM A BACK-

| BLOCK HOSPITAL. By

G.

M.

Smith.

| Caxton Press.

r ] THIS book is precisely what it claims to be: a collection of notes by a country doctor who has told his real story in an earlier volume. It is emphatically not a book of reminiscences. Why, Dr. Smith asks vehemently, should he "poach on the preserves of old fools in their dotage who, partly from idleness, and partly in an endeavour to recover their youth, bore others by describing?" He does not wish to show "what a devil of a chap he was," but to report what he is up to now, in the wards of his hospital, among his books, and in his battles with obstructionists. Nor does he draw a line between professional men and laymen, or believe that in writing for one group he is not also telling things to the others. He is neither more nor less interested in telling you why he allows his appendix patients "no fluids of any kind" till the third m/’-ning after the operation than he is in telling you why the politicians, bankers, and orthodox economists are losing the war, His medical practices it would of course be absurd to discuss in a place like this, though some of them -his midwifery technique, for example, a subject on which we all know, or should ‘know, something-sound very much like horse sense; but his philosophising in general is refreshing even when it is deliberately absurd. For Dr. Smith is a character-a person. It is a pity he has not indexed his notes because we would then have tabular information about his literary and philosophical enthusiasms. But it may be a sufficient indication of that side of him to point out that he quotes from Rabelais,-W. H. Davies, and Walt. Whitman on the same page. On the other hand, he does not often quote, or even refer to, the B.M.A., which he refuses to join because he refuses to be anybody but himself. For the same reason, no doubt, he neither supports the present Government’s free medical service nor the compromises offered by the profession. He of course offers an alternative, but it is not a very precise alternative, and it is clear in any case that what he really objects to is the surrender of his individuality. He in. fact says so very plainly: "I take up my stand in the ‘cathedral of what is good’; there will be ‘ murder in the cathedral ’ none the less, for I fight both the politicians and the B.M.A... . I trust to the accuracy of my arm to hit the right spot and so win." But you feel that he is now bluffing you. Victory to such a Hielander would be dull. He wants the fight to go on; and in Rawene, at least, it will. HYDROPONICS GARDENING WITHOUT SOIL. By A. H. Phillips. C. Arthur Pearson Ltd., 139 pp. Illustrated. Copy from the Hydroponics Institute, New Zealand. WitH a good deal of stimulus from such organisations as the Hydro-

ponics Institute, and publicity generally, the science of gardening without soil has attracted wide interest in New Zealand. It has also caused some controversy, when experimenters have had failures where great hopes of success had been held out to them. Mr. Phillips has written a book which should settle many differences, and help the amateur experimenter as much as it will improve the technique of the successful grower. The methods of growing plants in nutrient chemical solutions are described and explained in careful detail. Anyone who has already achieved success will be glad of an opportunity to confirm the worth of his methods or discover means of improving or enlarging his results. Those unfortunates whose hopes have so far been dashed will be able to check their processes by the standards laid down by this authority. A decidedly useful book for the gardener, the farmer, or those who are possibly just "interested." NEW ZEALAND NOVEL VALIANT LOVE. By Martha Washington Myers. A. H. and A. W. Reed. Price, 6/+. HOSE who are interested in the New Zealand novel for its own sake, those who enjoy reading about places, people, and politics which have significance only for the New Zealander, will turn with interest to Valiant Love, a new novel by Mrs. Myers. Though the theme is a wellused one, the author attains to some degree of originality by making her heroine a young half-caste Maori girl whose story is her attempt to force the Anglo-Saxon and rational gide- of her character to dominate the streak of fatalism inherited from her Maori mother. But Tarati’s ‘struggle remains merely Tarati’s struggle — there is no attempt made by the author to see this effort at adjustment as part of the whole story of New Zealand. That in fact applies to the whole of the book. The characters have no common element in which to think and move — they are anchored in no particular social milieuthey are nourished by no particular environment — and they therefore flit through the book, appearing and reappearing like so many will-o’-the-wisps. Tarati is the only character in the book who leaves the impression that she really exists.