"CASUALTY ENTRANCE"

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4641, 18 May 1938, Page 6

"CASUALTY ENTRANCE"

WARNING TO RECKLESS MOTORISTS "DEATH STALKS THE HIGHWAY." Under the above captions Mr Robert S. Close contributes the following article to the "Digest for World Reading" (Melbourne) in an effort to instil in the minds of reckless motorists a realisation of the fact that, in Australia and New Zealand, as elsewhere, •Death stalks 'he highway!"

The smell of fresh rain on warm bitumen drifts into the hospital foyer, where the casualty clerk sits checking the usual list of Saturday night drunks. The glaring globe above him sprays the whitened walls and gleams on the puddled path, circling before the open door. From a near-by couch of drifting earth a cricket stutters to life with a shrill rasp that soars above the monotonous murmur of the city traffic. Rain is falling softly, just enough to grease the roads, and bring waggons with their loads of quivering flesh and broken bones racing up the drive.

The night doctor has donned his smooth unstained gown and standing at the foot of a basin pedestal, cavefully scrubs his hands. He dries them and blows into his rubber gloves, before breathing deeply of the damp night air. "Well, it won't be long now," he prophesies aloud . . and with experienced accuracy.

A Startled Silence

The cricket feels a new vibration in the earth, and stops in startled silence. There is a slither of tyres before the door—the clatter of dropped steps and ambulance doors swing open, with practised urgency. Two men in uniform grasp the stretchei handles, and marching heavily, pass through the entrance to the operating theatre. The man they carry lies with closed eyes. Through his slacklyhanging mouth his breath comes in stertorous gasps. His head is a mal of blood and dirt. The doctor follows the stretcher —alert —asking Questions. The clerk dips his pen and makes an entry in his ledger—adding one more to the thousands of car accident cases marked in the volume before him.

Many of the dead are recorded there, too. Some of the 1350 Australians who were alive 12 months ago, until speeding steel spilt their blood, and brought them swift obliteration . . . or a slow stealing death of hopeless agony. But neither their deaths, nor the pain of the 22,000 who were injured by car accidents during the past 12 months in this country, mean much to the motorist speeding past the building. In the morning you, the motorist, may read the usual restrained newspaper report of week-end car accidents —see a few more names added to the growing dead; but to you, it is only another smash—a very remote happening —sometimes quite impersonal. It is always the other fellow that these things happen to. A Nasty Jolt. Occasionally your complacency may get a nasty jolt when you read that a fellow you had drinks with yesterday now lies dying with a broken back. Then, for a few days, you may realise that death rides always with you, in your car and you drive carefully. But it is when you forge„ tnat Death remembers: for he is there beside you —always.

Or perhaps you witness a car smash, complete with all the effects that print cannot paint. The hot, sickening stench of spouting blood. The ghastly sound of breath gurgling through a jagged windpipe. . . Then, for the rest of your journey you are the most careful driver on the road — until the picture fades and you slip back to the old ways . . . speeding . . . . cutting corners —while you console yourself with the idea that what you saw doesn't happen very often. But it does, night and day, at the rate of three every hour, of the 24 — and next time some other driver might be passing yours!

Grief and Agony

The possibility, however, would leasen considerably if only all your senses could soak in the grief and agony of the bad car smash; if you could be made to carry a permanent picture of the horrors that enter through the casualty end of the city hospital. For it is here that they are seen in all their hideous variety; so let us get back to it for the song of the cricket has stopped again—another waggon has swung into the entrance.

The driver pulls in close to the doors, where a shaft of light slashes the darkness. As he drops from his seat, he beckons to two attendants on duty within/ By the time they have reached him, the steps are down and the sheeted stretcher dragged "from the rack. On a seat inside the ambulance a man sits slumped with one hand supporting his bowed head. His well-cut suit is torn and crumpled. Saliva dribbled unheeded from hi* flaccid lips. With exery exhalation he makes a quivering moan. Strong arms lift him out, and help his stumbling steps to follow the woman on the

stretcher. Except for shock he is unhurt. Through the Windshield. Beneath the sheet the woman lies mercifully still. Her face is wrapped in bloodied bandages that literally hold it together, for when the car crashed her screaming mouth bit on the shattered windshield. Spasmodic coughs clear her blood-choked throat and blot crimson on the bandage. If she lives, her pitifully hideous face will be a lasting accusation to her husband, who used to take each corner on screaming tyres. Until that last turn where his car had shuddered on the greasy surface —had flung him to the roadside grass unhurt, before turning over with his wife's halfdecapitated head poking through the windscreen. While the doctor sews her face together, the husband lies drugged with shock, in a bed across the corridor There he will stay under observation while his dulled eyes gradually light with returning reason, and with surging memory will come remorse, for within himself he will know it need not have happened.

Time Saved to "Waste.

If only he had been content with 35 along those few miles of slippery road—instead of the 55 which, after all, would have saved so little time. And, having saved it, would it have been put to any noble purpose—or only saved to have the more to waste? Now it is gone, beyond all saving, like his wife's face which he will see again only as a shrunken, leering mask.

The doctor's gown is no longer clean and white, when he at last comes out from the theatre, and dropping his gory gloves into the basin, spurts hot soap and water on his relaxed fingers. As he gives particulars to the clerk to enter, he tells of the probing in each gash, before the needle could be used.

For the woman, in being tossed through the windscreen of the car, as it suddenly changed direction, at 55 miles an hour, had suffered an experience equivalent to being machine gunned with glass bullets having a velocity of over 90 feet a second.

With safety glass in your car you may, in a minor smash, be saved the cuts from the plate glass variety. But in a crash at high speed—and 90 per cent of all car accidents occur because of it —you may have your face torn away, or your scalp shaved roughly off in passing through it. And if the aperture isn't large enough for your shoulders to follow, it might take quite some time to find your gullotined head.

But there is little time for speculation in the casualty entrance on a showery night. Neither do all cases arrive in the comparative safety and comfort of an ambulance—unfortunately.

Knocked a Man Down

This time it is a private car that cuts the cricket's tentative stutter. The faint hum of a forgotten motor comes from behind the two young men who enter hurriedly. They look about with panicky eyes, then stumble toward the desk. There has been an accident—their car knocked him down —he is in the back seat. . .

A leg with a compound fracture, which has been jolting against a suitcase of bottled beer is a nasty sight. So it is not surprising that the two men sway and cry out as the victim is carried in. For strips of oozing flesh hang from a bone whose raw ends juts through ragged trousers. Even the policeman who has followed quickly on their trail loses some of his calm authority as he hears the crescendo of agonised groans that burst from the man's writhing lips as shock wears off. His face is stern as he ushers the men to a nearby seat—with them drifts a faint smell of alcohol. . .

A Little Child Dies

But, gruesome as it is, the case is not quite so bad as the clerk's memory of the little child who died as the stretcher passed his desk. He had looked down to see her glazing eyes roll up to meet his own. From her nostrils a thin trickle dribbled into her parted mouth, and dyed her tiny, glistening teeth. When the doctor looked at her crushed head, a blob of brain showed tangled in her curls. All the cold, technical details of the doctor's examination were only one page in his ledger. The man who had checked up on the accident told of having found brake marks back 100 feet from where the child was struck, and for 72 feet further on. At 35 miles an hour the same car could have stopped within 40 feet of the little girl.

It is only one. of many similar accidents, that could have been prevented, and might have been if you, the motorist, would bear in mind that your boasted braking power lags far behind in ratio to the speed improvement of the modern car. At one time your cruising speed was round about 35, and your two wheel brakes pulled you up in approximately 100 feet. Now you cruise at nearer 60—and cannot stop under twice the distance. Dry Statistics. But such dry statistics have never served to curb wanton driving, or to bring a realisation of the death deal

ing power of the projectile the motorist has under his control. The victim who arrives in yet another waggon had read that often enough; but they did not deter him from trying to slip out of a crowded lane of traffic to pass a few cars. And now the ambulance driver climbs leisurely from his seat, and from the door calls, "A D.0.A.. doc."

A cursory examination is all the doctor needs before he tosses his gloves into the basin, and signs a "Dead on Arrival" certificate, for the driver to stuff into his pocket as he climbs back on the ambulance. As the tail light vanishes through the gate, on its way to the morgue, the cricket, growing bolder, rasps a requiem to the man whose ruptured bowels are spilling through the hole made in his abdomen by a broken steering column. It is usually for the driver that death, exercising a diabolical sense of justice, reserves his most spectacular methods of disposal. It may be in a swift bashing of the brains on the instrument panel, or a ruptured heart, that floods the abdominal cavities, so that blood gushes from his dying mouth, if unpractised hands tilt his broken body.

Death's Icy Hand

Nor is Death's hand always icysometimes he likes to warm things up a bit by jamming you in a petrol soaked wreck-and then waits for someone to search about with matches • Perhaps he may only deal you an admonishment-in the form of a smashed pelvis or a fractured spine that will keep you crippled for the rest of your repentant days. But whatever the manner of your death or injury, you will be just another job to the doctor—another entry in the book for the casualty clerk. They have seen it all so very often—this procession of flayed flesh and broken bones—heard the sound of dropping steps—of marching feet. . . • and beneath that patch of earth, the

cricket singing his song of the shroud .... a shroud that may next be your own .... unless you realise that it's either slow down and be safe .... or speed and be 3lain.