ADVENTUROUS DOCTOR

Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 22, 20 October 1944, Page 6

ADVENTUROUS DOCTOR

New Zealander With Tito’s Partisans (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) AUCKLAND, October 19. A ?few Zealand doctor who is serving with Marshal Tito’s partisans, and referred to in recent fable news, is Dr. Lindsay S. Rogers, who practised in Te Awamutu for some years. A Dunedin man in the early forties, Dr, Rogers qualified at the Otago Medical School in 1925, went to England in 1939, and joined the R.A.M.C. He did a great deal of urgent surgery in casualty clearing stations in the Mediterranean war zone,-and following the invasion of Italy was allowed to join Marshal Tito’s forces. He has gained an international reputation as a soldier-doctor-adventurer. The magazine “Time,” calling him “Dr. X,” said in its issue of May 8: “Dr. A. is a tough New Zealander who asked for a transfer to Yugoslavia after perform-, ing 9000 operations in Africa. Marshal Tito told him to set up a 200-cot hospital in a farmhouse. He drove pigs and chickens out of the house and went to work, without instruments or medicine. For an anti-septic he used salt water. His instruments were a earpeuteFs hammer, hacksaw and chisels. To keen up the spirits of the wounded, unanaesthetised men. and to drown the sound of the saw gritting through bone, he ordered boys aud girls to sing partisan songs. Often half of the injured were women.”