A Surgeon's Comments

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28890, 9 May 1959, Page 3

A Surgeon's Comments

No Miracles Among Friends. By Sir Heneage Ogilvie. Parrish. 176 pp.

Sir Heneage Ogilvie’s book of reminiscence and commentary will appeal to medical men in particular, and this is especially true of such chapters as “Surgical Judgment” and “The Future of Surgery.” However the author’s recollections and his summing up of life as he has found it should interest the general reader as well, unless he is indeed hard to please.

Of course, as is to be expected, the majority of topics have something to do with the sick bed or the operating theatre; and at times the most harmless-seeming paragraph ends with a tableau quite horrifying to the layman. The pages devoted to Woburn Abbey Will provide a sufficient example. Sir Heneage Ogilvie makes short work of the eccentricities of the Duchess of Bedford and turns with lively interest to an operation he performed at Woburn. “I remember the feeling of horror with which I suddenly realised that I was about to cut across the common bile duct, the hepatic artery and the portal vein.” Passages like these rouse in the unlearned mind vivid memories of the character in “Three Men in a Boat” who read the medical dictionary at the British Museum with such dire results. To speak more seriously, however, these pages are the work of a distinguished man of science, whose brisk interest in human ailments is matched by a sympathy with his patients as helpful as it is real. The author must be forgiven for some very unkind remarks about Bernard Shaw’s plays in Chapter 6.

Love With Paprika. By Maria Molnar. Cassell. 211 pp.

This attractive looking book proves on closer inspection to be very disappointing. Maria Molnar has a wonderful background for her story—a vast estate on the plains of Hungary—and the material she uses is often fascinating. However it would appear as if she had decided to aim at a quick success by adding several well-known components warranted to stimulate attention and to impart an element of risk. Presumably this is the paprika made so much of in the title and emphasised on the dust jacket. However that may be, the procedure has not been carried out with sufficient deftness, and the result can scarcely be called a happy one. In any case Colette was doing this sort of thing as long ago as 1900. Mario Molnar, as she presents herself in adolescence, has nothing in common with the incomparably Claudine.