ST. JOHN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17532, 25 January 1919, Page 4

ST. JOHN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL

INGENIOUS AID,

In the British Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, near tho French Coast, there was_ lying, throughout last winter, an Australian soldier, whose life, in the opinion of tho surgeons, had only just been eared by the perfection of a special kind of bed which some one had given to the hospital. The man had been deeply and very dangerously wounded in the back, in such a way that his wounds coifld not have been dressed in an ordinary bed without such changes of position as would themselves have been injurious. By an ingenious mechanism the special bed could be twisted, tilted, and inclined till it waa in any convenient height, and any position of the patient's body conld be reached without turning him over.

The Hospital of St. John is perhaps the most perfect in France. It is housed in good wooden huts, .amply spaced- out and admirably planned for convenience in working and administration; each wooden ward is light, airy, cheerful in colour, and 'provided with every imaginable aid to cleanliness and good order. One of its special belongings is a cardiograph, or apparatus for recording on a chart, by the help of electricity, all the movements of the heart, so that in cases of irregular action of the heart the.evenly serrated line produced on the paper by a normal heart action is varied with spasmodic upward leaps or downward collapses.