EARLY OPERATIONS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20151, 21 May 1928, Page 11

EARLY OPERATIONS

SURGERY OF FIFTY YEARS AGO NURSES WITH PIPES. Times when doctors performed operations with the aid of unskilled “Sarah Gamp” nurses smoking clay pipes are recalled by Sir David Serjeant, a retired doctor of Peckham Road, Camberwell, who has just celebrated his ninety-eighth birthday (writes the London Daily Telegraph). Despite his great age, Sir David has still good health and a keen intellect, and delights in talking to local doctors of the great change in medicine and surgery he has seen. “I have performed operations many a time with no assistant but a woman smoking a clay pipe—those were the nurses we had,” he said. “I remember when I was in hospital with laryngitis in Melbourne there was one drunken nurse in charge of 30 beds of all sorts of cases. I would wake up in the morning and And a dead man on either side of me, and the nurse dead drunk. ’ ’ Sir David had an adventurous youth. He was the son of a Huntingdonshire lawyer, who articled him to :» Peterborough doctor; but when ho had served his articles he sailed to Australia, where he worked as a gold-digger at Mount Alexander. “Gold-digging,” said Sir David, “did not make my fortune, and I was a gardener, a gold-buyer, a painter, a paper-hanger, a conveyancer and an engrossing clerk before I made enough money to come back to England to com plete my studies and take my degree.” Sir David was one of the Victorian Eleven in the first inter-colonial cricket match, played in Melbourne in 185(?. against New South Wales.