EVERYONE HAPPY

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 3 September 1931, Page 10

EVERYONE HAPPY

PROSPEROUS CZECHO-SLOV AK'IA. “REST PLACE IN EUROPE.” Of all the countries of Western and! Central Europe, Czecho-Slovakia alone _ is enjoying a season of busy prosper-' lty, according to Dr. J. P. McQuilkin, formerly of Southland, who returned to New’ Zealand on Tuesday. Dr. Mc- • niilkin was in Czecho-Slovakia in February and March last, when it was nla.in to" him that the place was flourishing and in a. better condition that any of the surrounding States. One only had to travel round and make comparisons, he said, to recognise that it was the best country at the present time in Europe, he told a “Dominion” reporter at Wellington. When Dr. McQuilkin was in Czechoslovakia the place was thriving, with everybody busy and happy. it made a big contrast with Germany and Australia. Vienna, with a population of two. millions, was the capital of a State of six millions, and with no industry or money, was in a. terrible state. Germany also was in a bad way, and Dr. McQuilkin thought while he was there that there was going to !:e some sort of trouble in the form of a revolution. Taken on the whole, the people in Germany were all very poor and unsettled. Czecho-Slovakia was still very happy at having got Bohemia under the Peace Treaty, Dr. McQuilkin said. The Czechs as a nation were for 400 years under the heel of Austria, and when they were released from this oppression and then got Bohemia into the bargain, they thought the millennium had” come. Factories and mines were all ready for them, and they .stepped into industry in a big way. At the present time they were producing practically everything they wanted, even their own trains and aeroplanes. The Czechs hated the Austrians, but they loved President Wilson, to whose "memory . they had erected statues all over the country, Dr. MeMiilkin said. At Prague there was a particularly fine .statue. Dr. McQuilkin, who was aeconi- .• allied bv iiis wife and son. has returned to New Zealand after two vears spent in post-graduate study at London, Edinburgh and Vienna. The things that impressed him most in the medical world were the tremendous amount of cancer research being carried out at various clinics, and the advances made, especially at Edinburgh, in the use of radium for the treatment of malignant disease. New methodsi in anaesthesia, particularly the use of basal hypnotics, and the enormous growth in the use of spinal anaesthetics were also striking, as well as the big advances made m the surgery of the sympathetic nervous svstem.