THE FIRST TRAIN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 130, 4 June 1930, Page 18

THE FIRST TRAIN.

There was 'a man in Australia the other day who had a very bad pain. It got worse and worse till he knew that he would die unless something was done.

He olid not send for the doctor because there wasn't one. But telegraph poles run for ever across the bush, and from his lonely station he rang up the nearest nurse, who lived 200 miles away at Alice Springs. People who live in England can hardly imagine what it must be like to live 200 miles from the district nurse. They are brave folk who do it.

When the call reached Alice Springs Sisters Inglis and Cavahagh, who live there, had just returned from a patient eighty miles away. They set off again, travelled all night, and found that the man with the pain had acute appendicitis.

They took him back with them, travelling all day, and made him as comfortable as they could in their nursing home. The nursing homes of the Australian Inland. Mission are usually primitive places, but they have wireless telephones. The call -for help went out. There came back an answer from civilisation; a surgeon chanced to be coming from Adelaide, a thousand miles away. A few years ago Alice Springs was only a telegraph station, but a railway has just crept out to it, and on the very first train to run into Alice Springs (recorded in the C.N. a few months ago) came the surgeon. Hq had intended to spend a holiday in the bush, but when the call for help came he packed a bag full of .instruments and dressings, and brought an assistant. There was no operating, table no steriliser, and no chemist's shop at Alice Springs, but they managed to save the man's°life. "He was lucky," said the surgeons; "it was Just in time." They refused to take any pay, and they presented their instruments to the little home in ease some other doctor passing by should need them for an emergency operation.

Therj the good surgeons were prepared to begin their holiday. But Alice Springs would not let them. It was a priceless opportunity to see a doctor, and they were called upon to do all sorts of things, including the extraction of eighteen teeth for one man and twentytwo for another.

"We shall never forget the first train to reach Alice Springs," say the sisters.