SLIPS OF THE LAYMAN

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 18, 22 January 1938, Page 13

SLIPS OF THE LAYMAN

Though Sir A. McNalty documents his statement, in a newly-issued report of: the Ministry of Health, that medicine has owed a great debt to the novelists, there are few subjects on which the unwai'y author —or any other layman, for that matter —can so easily come a cropper as on the details of medical and surgical practice (says the "Manchester Guardian"). Hugh Conway, in his once enormously popular "Called Back," described a patient being operated upon for double cataract at one sitting, with immeci;.ate restoration of sight so complete that he had not, even to resort to glasses. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has a story of a doctor carrying in his pocket a bottle of bromide wherewith he treats a madman who has just committed a murder, producing sleep and sanity with one dose of the potent drug, while "Sapper" shocked the shade of Harvey by making the arteries convey to the heart a poison applied to the skin. Even the careful Flaubert writes in "Madame Bovary" of a phrenological head "all painted blue and marked with figures down the thor:;;:"!