ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22243, 6 November 1937, Page 20

ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SURGEON A Woman Surgeon. The Life _J nd Work of Rosalie Slaughter Morton. Robert Hale and Co. 355 pp. (12/6 net.)

The autobiography of Rosalie Slaughter Morton gains a great part of its interest, naturally, from the fact that she is a surgeon and describes the journey which has carried her to eminence. But it gams almost as much from the vigour and directness and versatility which would have been hers, no less, had she followed any more usual and less adventurous course. Some of the best of these chapters are those in which she gives swift but far from superficial glimpses of her early work under Landau, Martin, von Olshausen, and Pick in Berlin. She also knew Paul Ehrlich and his wife the great Ehrlich: indeed, as she says, to be named with Pasteur and Koch —and Professor Ewald and his wife.

I am grateful that my first year away from home was spent m Germany in association with men and women who expressed an aristocracy of intellect. To be m their presence was to learn how simple and unpretentious are the really great. They knew the worth of their work otherwise they would not have dedicated themselves to it. But they also knew that elsewhere other men and women wore as earnestly searching the manifestations of truth and that, whatever their work, wherever they lived, all were world comrades.

In Vienna she went first to Caposi, the skin specialist, then found opportunity to observe the work of Obersteiner, Kraft-Ebbing, Nothnagle Kovacs, and the Pole, Kahsko, but finally, having studied the operative technique of a famous trio, Bilroth, Albert, and Gusserow, she made the last her surgical master. An interesting acquaintance was Count von Pirquet, who devised the tuberculosis test known by his name. A chapter with a surprise is the one headed “Christmas in Russia,” notable for an interview, very well recorded, with Tolstoi. She met Ibsen, too; and he told her that he reconstructed the heredity and childhood of all his characters, actually writing out a “forework” for himself, to give each a reasonable background and family environment and make each figure “clear and convincing in my own mind.” Later chapters deal with the author’s practice in Washington and New York, where she was active in a campaign for public health education. While “men physicians were just waking up to preventive medicine,” she told the Public Health Section of the American Medical Association conference in 1909, “women doctors had for 50 years been stressing the importance of educating mothers in the care of children’s health, in pre-natal care of mothers, etc.” In the World War she served on the Salonika front and in Serbia, chiefly, and earned nine decorations from her own and from foreign Governments. It is an indirect way of praising this book to say that, modestly written as it is, it leaves the reader sure that she earned every scrap of ribbon nine times over.