MIRACLE OF MODERN SURGERY

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2641, 22 September 1919, Page 7

MIRACLE OF MODERN SURGERY

In the ordinary way, when a patient is brought into one of the big hospitals with, say, a bullet, or other foreign substance embedded in his body, an X-ray photograph is taken and developed, and the operating surgeon works from the information thus obtained. But there are cases when this method is impossible, because an instant operation alone can save the patient. In these comparatively rare instances the injured man is operated upon in the X-ray room itself, a weird apartment, where dynamos buzz and blare, and strange electric contrivances crackle and hiss and screech. The operating "table" here is not unlike a coffin in appearance, i but the bottom is of thick plate glass. In this the patient, having been previously anaesthetised, is laid. The ordinary electric lights are then switched off. so that the room is plunged into profound darkness. A moment later the X-ray operator clicks a lever, and through the glass bottom of the table there springs up a pale absinthe-green light, which penetrates the patient's tissues, enabling the operating surgeon and his assistants to sec right through the man's body. The bullet is discovered and swiftly extracted. A swabbing out and binding up of the wound follows, and a little later, the patient, still unconscious, is taken back to the ward he quitted an hour or so before, freed from a danger that would have meant a speedy death to him in the old unscientific days.