Governor’s Tribute To Army Medical Men

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30364, 13 February 1964, Page 12

Governor’s Tribute To Army Medical Men

A soldier saluted the doctor last evening when the GovernorGeneral (Sir Bernard Fergusson) gave the Arthur E. Mills Memorial Oration to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. In a speech sprinkled with recollections of his years in the British Army, including Burma service, the Governor-General said the shallow - minded could argue that soldiers were trained to take life and doctors to save it; but soldiers existed not to make wars but to prevent them. Wherever they prevented trouble there were regimental medical officers with them in the thick of things, ministering not only to soldiers but running as well unofficial clinics for the local people.

While he was with the Chindits in Burma he found that tihe ordinary soldier, without becoming hypochondriacal in the least degree. learned to look on the medical officer as an adviser more than as a healer, Sir Bernard Fergusson said. In most other theatres of war in which he served the doctor was troubled only when one was sick. In the Chindits, a soldier learned to look after himself. He had learned that he needed to carry six items of medical equipment—a disinfectant to be used freely and often and as a precaution on every scratch or graze, gentian violet, sulp'hanilamide, adhesive plaster, morphia, and suppressive anti - malaria tablets. Medical advice was not always consistent, his Excellency said. Soldiers in Burma

were told that first mepacrine and then atebrin were sure guarantees against catching malaria. “This was just not true,” he said, “What happened presumably was that you could get a build-up of malaria greater than these drugs could suppress.” Sunbathing

Another example was sunbathing. Until 1942 the British Army was told that exposure of the head or body to the sun was lethal. Any man seen without his topi between dawn and sunset was “run in.” But then came an order in the India-Burma theatre that, the tactical situation permitting, every soldier under the rank of lieutenantgeneral must bare his torso to the sun for three hours a day. • “That spelled the end of the prickly heat to which, for years of foreign service, I had been a blasphemous martyr,” his Excellency said. Giving some thoughts on psychology and morale. Sir Bernard Fergusson said he was not attacking sciences as such, only the distortion of them which became fashionable in certain quarters during the war. During the four years to 1944 when by far the greatest part of the British Army was immobile in England and had to be occupied and entertained, bogus interpretations of psychiatry and psychology had a free run, he

said. This was to the misery of the ordinary regiment officer and to the embarrassment of reputable psychologists. He recalled a private telling him that his psychiatrist said that something or other Sir Bernard Fergusson had “just inflicted on him” would be bad for his ego. Psychiatry

“Nor am I yet convinced that psychiatric methods of selection—in choosing officers for instance—are really better than selection by experienced regimental officers from among men they have long had under observation and have got to know well," he continued.

Of courage and its "corollary” cowardice, his Excellency said he was convinced that Lord Moran was right in his main thesis that every man’s stock of courage was exhaustible. No man's courage should be tried too high or too long—his batteries had to be recharged—and he knew very few fighting men whose courage had not worn threadbare at one time or another. But he believed courage was a community virtue more than an individual one. he said. The virtue of an infantry regiment was pumped into it by two or three centuries of tradition, suggesting to each individual that he must live up to the past and do as well as his forbears did. “The man of courage is the man who contributes to this reserve and draws on it. The coward is the man who does neither,” he said.