DEATH’S ADVERSARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 770, 23 April 1954, Page 13

DEATH’S ADVERSARY

A SURGEON’S LIFE, by Ferdinand Sauerbruch; Andre Deutsch, English price 15/-. S° many good doctors have written bad books that one tends to shy off a new one. But Ferdinand Sauerbruch was more than a good doctor: he was a discoverer. And he was more than an amateur writer: he was a distinctive personality, devoid of cant. His bock, translated from the German by Fernand Renier and Anne Cliff, comes through cleanly and vigorously: with the high adventure of the Axel Munthe school, sans the sentimental baloney. Sauerbruch’s great contribution to surgery was the pressure chamber. Until he thought it up in the early hours one morning in 1905, operations could not be performed inside the chest cavity. . . The solution was so simple! He worked feverishly, startled by his own audacity: experimenting first with animals, then with human patients, whose death would otherwise be a foregone conclusion. He failed, and then succeeded. The chapters on this are so vividly told that the reader shares in the discovery: sharing his elation in the conquest of pain, and another frontier gained against death. Other chapters, on his work in the Kaiser’s War and then in Hitler’s Reich, are equally inspiring. They reinforce one’s sure knowledge that knowledge is international: that science belongs to humanity, and that everywhere "ironic points of light flash out where’er the just exchange their messages."

Anton

Vogt