CARTER, OF MESOPOTAMIA.

Colonist, Volume LX, Issue 14545, 25 October 1917, Page 2

CARTER, OF MESOPOTAMIA.

THE MAN WHO INSISTED AND PERSISTED.

I Born at Ootacamund, in India, in 1875, Lieutenant-Colonel R. Markham Carter, the man who put things straight in Mesopotamia, was professionally educated at St. George's Hospital London, where he is chiefly remembered as a closer full-back hi the I Rugby football team. j Alter taking his degree he returned Ito India and achieved high reputation |a.s a plague expert. Tins led to. his I being appointed specialist in preventive i medicine and bacteriology under the injdian Government, and curator of the ■museum at tho Grant Medical College m Bombay. A good story is told of him in connection with the latter 'appointment. Carter was always very keen on adding I fresh specimens to his rather gruesome museum. One day lie spotted in the street in Bombay a native with ale" ailment that was rare, and which would ;have meant either death or amputation ,at an early date. j Beckoning the man to him, Carter explained this, and ottered to have tho i leg taken off at once and to buy it for hve rupees afterwards for preservation m spirits. "Certainly, Sahib," agreed the native. An hour later the amputation had ! been successfully performed, the man's i lie was saved, and he was the richer by hve rupees. Next morning, before daybreak, Carter's house was besieged |by a crowd of natives suffering iron-' every imaginable ailment, clamouring ior an opportunity to earn hve rupees! lhe story of Colonel Carter's fearless exposure of the medical horrors in Mesopotamia, and of how his superiois threatened him with arrest for daring to speak the -truth, is now common property. What is perhaps not so well known is the manner in which he has Jaboured since then in order to make any repetition of such horrors impossible. 1

Before lie took over the medical arrangements for the expedition the sol.

diers liad to drink the Tigris water. This was known indifferently to tho troops on the spot as "diluted dysentery" and "typhoid soup." it merited both appellations. '

Carter had distilled water for drinks ing purposes sent up etream in covered barges, thereby saving many hundreds of lives. Scurvy, which vied with dysentery and typhoid in piayino- havoc with Townshend's original expeditionary, force, he combated by turning market^ gardener on a gigantic scale. That is to say he planted thirty thousand acres of alluvial soil at Basra with onions, cabbages, and other vegetables for The use of the troops. He also ordered refrigerating barges' to be built, and thereby ensured them a constant supply o f fresh meat.