DRAMAS OF BIG HOSPITAL

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1927, Page 13

DRAMAS OF BIG HOSPITAL

LOVER WHO CHEATED DEATH. Many moving stories of life in a big London hospital, where suffering, tragedy, and acts of heroism and devotion are inextricably mingled, are told by Mr, Philip Inman, superintendent of Charing Cross Hospital, in The Human Touch. How, in a patient’s fight with death, the presence of a wife, lover, or longlost son often turns the scales is the theme of several of these stories. In one case the fiancee of a young man of 23 sentenced to death by the .doctors refused to accept the verdict and declared that in spite of everything he should not die. Night and day she remained by his side. “The prophecy made by that gid has come true. Weeks have passed"since her sweetheart came to us in what seemed to be a hopeless state. Yet he lives and the doctors declare he has made an amazing recovery.” One patient, aged six, so bullied the other children in his ward that they begged to be rid of him. As punishment he was kept in bed all day between two empty cots, one of which ■was later filled by a seven-year-old girl about to undergo an operation for appendicitis. She was terrified by the tales that had been told her of hospitals, and Johnny alone was able, to reassure her —

“Don’t cry,” he said gently; “they won’t hurt you. I’ve been cut open, and I didn’t feel nothin’.” For half an hour he chatted away, and in the end she had become reconciled. When she went into the operating theatre her companion shouted out cheerfully: “Don’t forget what I telled you.” A doctor who had years before been struck off the register for irregular conduct once eame to Mr. Inman with a strange request-. It was that he might be allowed to visit the operating theatre and watch the surgeons at work.

"A few minutes later he was standing spellbound while a brilliant sur-

geon fought with death. For over an hour he stood there, and all the while his eye glowed with a new and strange light. When the operation was over and we came down the stairs together he murmured brokenly: 'lf I hadn’t played the fool I might be standing in that man’s shoes and saving lives like him. What a blunderer I was!”

One of Mr. Inman’s most moving stories is that of a war-time conscientious objector who was admitted to hospital suffering from terrible injuries received in the rescue of a fellow workman who had been pinned down by machinery. In his dairy were found these entries —■

“May 22, 1915. —Met J.H. who called me conchy and shirker. “May 17, 1920—Firm’s roll of honour unveiled. Asked to keep away. And I loved them all.” The rescued man for whom the conscientious objector lost his life was the “J.H.” of the diary.