SURGICAL SERVICE

Grey River Argus, 25 March 1943, Page 3

SURGICAL SERVICE

MEN RESTORED BY MODERN SCIENCE. SYDNEY, March 12. Somewhere in Australia is a hospital Io which the sorely wounded are rushed from New Guinea and the Solomons, and when the war is over medical men will read its history as if it were a romance. A pilot parachuted over New Guinea, fractured six ribs, punctured a lung and dislocated a shoulder. He tugged his shoulder back into position by pulling it on the branch of a tree. Then he wandered for 20 days and his only food was grass. For four days his lun'g bled, and he was greatly troubled by a dislocation of the joint where the breastbone and collarbone met. He lost 451 b. in weight. “When finally, he was rushed to hospital he was a mere skeleton,” the Chief of the Surgical Services. Major Joseph Dolce, of Buffalo, said. “But he is as good as ever now.” In another case an American soldier was considered to have no chance of survival when he was brought to the hospital with a bullet wound fin the liver. The bullet went right through the liver and stomach, but the wound was stitched up satisfactorily, and to-dav the patient is demanding to be allowed to return to the front line. More than 1000 cases have gone through the operating rooms, and many' thousands more have been treated in the wards.. Deaths have totalled only three. In spite of the terrific pressure under which the surgeons have worked after the different great battles in the Pacific area, they have performed operations the. ingenuity of which will stagger other doctors if ever they are recorded in medical journals.,