HEROIC DOCTORS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24912, 11 May 1942, Page 6

HEROIC DOCTORS

WORK ON BURMA FRONT OPERATIONS IN RICE FIELD The superb heroism of medical men in the wilds of Burma is the subject of this despatch cabled to the Sydney Morning Herald by William Munday, a special war correspondent on the Chinese front. He tells of three American doctors who, at night, performed major operations on 150 wounded Chinese soldiers by the light of hurricane lamps in an open rice field. Japanese aeroplanes had roared over them as daylight faded, and injured Indians and Burmans, from a nearby village where the enemy had dropped bombs, already lay swathed in bandages among the tight-lipped Chinese soldiers waiting for their turn on the camp-bed operating table. Dr Gordon Seagrave, a 45-year-old graduate of the John Hopkins Medical School, United States, was in charge. He has been in the front line with the Chinese with his American Baptist Mission hospital unit since fighting began. Dr John Grand! ay, a Harvard graduate, and Dr Donald O'Hara,- from Minnesota, wearing pyjama trousers and sandals, and with perspiration streaming from their bare chests, were already hard at work when I arrived. Dr Seagrave took his place beside them while 19 brownskinned native nurses went on preparing the wounded. Toil Without Rest The doctors knew there was no rest for them that night, or the next night either. There were 180 more desperately wounded men at Yamethin.lt did not seem possible that any of these men over whom the doctors bent could survive, but Dr Seagrave told me: " We'll save 'em all. This is just routine stuff, and the Chinese are tough." He told me that a Chinese soldier with unextracted bullets in his brain got up from the ground where he lay after a skull operation and ran for shelter with others when Japanese bombers came overhead. "He did not even complain of headache," said Dr Seagrave. Another, with a bullet through the brain, was put under a table until the bombers passed. "We thought he had not a hope, and left him there to get on with others who appeared to have a chance," said Dr Seagrave. "When we had finished he was still alive, so we patched him up. too. He is paralysed on one side of the body, but he will mend."

Dr Seagrave had driven the previous day to his L<ylem dressing station, beating the Japanese into Hopong by two hours, driving his truck with one hand and holding a revolver in the other "to make a big noise if anyone was blocking the road." . He filled the truck with nurses and equipment, and headed for Lashio as Japanese mortars lobbed their first shells on to the town. At Namsang he heard about a wounded American pilot who had made a forced landing. He found him in a bullock cart, and took bullets and pieces of aeroplane metal from his legs and arms. , ...;-■-;.

arms. Dr Seagrave was now swabbing deep wounds with alcohol and pouring chloroform on wads of cotton-wool. “ We cannot use either because of the open lights," he explained. He operated on 150 cases in his first 130 hours with the Chinese on the Toungoo front. That was a month ago, and since then he has been forced to move seven times as the Japanese pushed nearer.