RISKING DEATH FOR HUMANITY

Matamata Record, Volume XVI, Issue 1447, 3 August 1933, Page 7

RISKING DEATH FOR HUMANITY

Deeds Of The “Heroes Of Medicine”

THERE are times when a doctor has to step deliberately almost I within the very portals of death. Every doctor worth his salt has time and again in his practice flirted with death. They do not do it consciously or directly for humanity’s sake, for few are philanthropists or altruists. No one will say that among their number there are not choice spirits who love their profession chiefly because it places within their hands the power to relieve the suffering and restore the crippled or maimed. Nor can it be denied that in their ranks ithere are some who have chosen the 'healing profession solely because it jean lever them into a higher social position or may prove the most lucrative of callings. J Of such stuff the heroes of medicine jor surgery are not made. That is natural, for noble deeds can scarcely 'fsnerge where the motive is ignoble. !&«t us turn to the others, happily the threat majority. (j What, then, is it that makes medical men risk death? It is that they have sworn life-long allegiance to the art of healing, whether in the practice of their profession or in the science of their laboratories. “Ars longa, vita brevis,” is their motto. The art of medicine is eternal, and they are willing slaves to it, so that they may ever make it more glorious in its achievements for the human race. Personal lucre or advancement is nothing compared with that. This spirit has noble expression in the Physician’s Prayer attributed to the ancient Greek physician, Maimonides: — "Give me frugality beyond all, except in the great Art of Medicine. Never awaken in me the notion that I know enough. Oh, give me strength and zeal to enlarge my knowledge and to attain ever to more. Our art is great; the mind of man presses forward ever.” I So we go blithely into danger, and the reward is that most of us lead a jfcharmed life. }£ut alas! Some do not, writes a jgbrrespondent in the "Johannesburg ,Btar.” All of us have heard of the :devot.ed medical men who shut themselves up in leper settlements and /contracted the disease. .• ! '"ssir Henry Head, the grea!t nerve j specialist, the greatest living author- ; qtf on paratypK deliberately had the ;

nerves of one forearm severed at the elbow, so that he might record firsthand the symptoms and so advance our knowledge on the subject of deep sensibility. Now he himself is a helpless victim of creeping paralysis. Now take the infectious fevers. There was the medical missionary, Dr Jackson, who when the bubonic plague was at Mukden, China, worked night and day until, at last utterly worn

out, he himself succumbed to it. And in order that his nurses should not catch it, he forbade anyone to nurse him. There are many other instances of medical martyres to the plague. Similar to this is the case of Dr Adrian Stokes. He went to West Africa to study yellow fever on the spot. He wrote: “We have our fish hooked. It is just a matter of landing him, only a matter of time, unless our tackle breaks.” Alas! the tackle did break, or rather the fisher himself was submerged in the river of death. There are even cases on record not only of research-doctors, but also their students, having subjected their own bodies to the bites of the yellow fever and malaria mosquitoes, or disease-bearing insects, in order that doubtful points might be cleared up. But to me there is no greater hero in the history of medicine than the French physician of last century, Laennec, who is better known as the originator of the stethoscope. He himself had?,? consumption of the lungs, which he knew would bring him to an untimely death. He was poor. q£Uq in very sore straits. Yet

he deliberately devoted what years of life might remain to him to the study of consumption, and struggled on in poverty and ill-health, seeking not to win fame or gold, but simply that he might leave to mankind the secret of the cure. It was left to Robert Koch to crown his work, but I think that in our hearts no one has a warmer place than poor, heroic, Laennec. Many a man could not have brought himself to peer into the ravages of other folk’s bodies caused by the disease he carried in his own. Laennec was its daily companion, till in the forties it claimed him for its own.

Turn now to the dread disease of diphtheria. We have heard of many cases where not only the doctor but also the gallant nurse has sucked out the membrane which has choked up the tracheotomy-tube. Perhaps this is not exactly flirting with death, but it comes perilously near to it, as paralysis may seem to its victims a living death. Here I must refer to the deadly perils which can beset our sister profession, that of nursing. Lately the number of nurses who, though immunised, have caught diphtheria, has caused disquietude in some countries. We are panic-stricken when diphtheria enters our homes. Shall we not honour, even grant some meed of heroism to those who in hospitals day in and out come into immediate contact with those very germs ?,$ There have been many medical martyrs through X-ray injuries. So terribly penetrative are those rays that between the tube and the operator must be placed a screen of sheetlead three-quarters of an inch thick with an aperture of leaded glass. Should this be accidentally displaced the results may be tragic, for such burns have been known to turn to cancer. A few years ago a London X-ray specialist died. His left forearm and right fingers had been amputated from this cause; but for 20 years, maimed as he was, he had de* voted his life to devise apparatus so that other workers should not b« harmed.

Then there is the story of SU James Simpson, the discoverer oj chloroform. He and some colleague! determined to test it on their own persons before they recommended if to the public. When Sir James awoke he saw one colleague lying with glassy eyes staring upwards, jaw dropped and head sagging. Fo*» tunately ha recovered. 6