WAR GAS

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 July 1937, Page 13

WAR GAS

PSYCHO LO( fICALVI < ’T IMS. SYDNEY, .lune 25. Professor 11. Whit ridge Davies, professor of Physiology at. Sydney University, said in a lecture yesterday that the percentage of gas victims to the victims of other weapons in the Great War was practically negligible. His medical experience, he added, had proved to him that many supposed gas victims were in reality psychological victims. They knew they had been gassed, and they persisted in the belief that they would never recover, lie had cured many of these supposedly permanent victims by removing from their minds the belief that, because they had lost, their voices through gas or were suffering in other ways, they would never recover. If the history of man) bronchial or other diseases of the respiratory system could be traced it would probably he found that many wrongly blamed gas for their ailments. Professor Davies said he made the statement in reply to a returned soldier who, following a previous , lecture in which he said that only 3 pci cent, of the soldiers gassed in the war had died from the effects, had asked: “What about the large numbers ■who wore gassed and have since suffered permanent injury to their respiratoi) organs?" During the war, said the lecturer, it was found that, only 5 per cent, of the large numbers gassed had suffered permanent disability. Professor Davies emphasised the danger of riding in ears in which defects allowed carbon monoxide fumes to escape in such a manner that the) were inhaled. Closed cars increased the danger he said. He had ridden in a ear in which the exhaust allowed the fumes to escape, and he inhaled them while sitting in the back seat. A hen he alighted he experienced a tired feeling which made him fit only for bed. Next day he had a violent headache.