HOSPITAL FOR PEARLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20538, 12 April 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

HOSPITAL FOR PEARLS.

VALUABLE PATIENTS,

IN THE CAVE OF ALADDIN.

There is a hospital in London whose patients are insured for nearly half a million pounds. They do not arrive in ambulances. Instead, shabbily dressed men bring them in, very often loose in their waist-coat pockets. It is the establishment of the healor of sick pearls in Hatton Garden, the street, that hides an Aladdin's cave of jewels behind a frontage of prosaic offices. When a writer in a London newspaper visited the healer he saw pearls in all stages of disease. There were rheumatic ones, and others that had grown thin and shrunken from senile decay, pearls whose complexions had lost their virginal bloom from an overdose of cosmetics, pearls with fatty degeneration, pearls that were fair outside until the surgeon's knifo revealed that they were rotten at the core, those that, had unsightly warts on the smooth curves of their skins, others that wero cracked and blistered, reddened with rouge or pallid with powder, and those whose skins had lost the sheen and lustre of health.

Once a pearl has been drilled for threading in a. necklace, its delicate interior is an easy prey for every kind of chemical poison. Before then, its outer layer is as impenetrable as an eggshell; but once that has been broken, it may absorb cosmetics of all kinds from the skin ef its wearer.

Cold cream and oils, when absorbed, make a pearl dull and greasy. Rouge and powder destroy its colour. Acids such as a rheumatic skin produces eat, it, away. And the friction of the thread itself wears it down until a good deal of its original weight is lost. That is where the healer can help. He strips the pearl .just as one might shell a hard-boiled egg, and leaves—if is lucky—a clean, bright skin beneath. But like a surgeon, he is never certain what his incision is going to reveal within. An outer shell that was once perfect in coiour and lustre may conceal a core that is stained and valueless. It, is a gamble. Sometimes, when the pearl has grown grea«v with unguents, medicine is used insteadv of surgery. The sick pearl is baked on blotting paper in a Diiniature Turkish bath until the grease is absorbed. Or in the case of a valuable stone it, may be examined by ultra violet light, before the drastic step of " skinning " it is decided upon. It is no small responsibility to reduce the weight, of a pearl by 50 per cent.., which is the usual loss in such a case. Ultra-violet light has another value to the pearl physician. It tells him from what part of "the world his patient has come. Australian pearls subjected to its rays turn blue. Indian ones turn and those from Madagascar and the South Seas, yellow.