A Surgeon in Belgium | Page 7

was septic, and had, in
many cases, to be dressed several times a day. Everyone had to work
hard, sometimes very hard; but as a rule we got through the drudgery in
the morning, and in the afternoon everything was in order, and we
should, I think, have compared very favourably in appearance with
most hospitals at home.
But we had to meet one set of conditions which would, I think, baffle
many hospitals at home. Every now and then, without any warning,
from 50 to 100, even in one case 150, wounded would be brought to
our door. There was no use in putting up a notice "House Full"; the
men were wounded and they must be attended to. In such a case our
arrangement was a simple one: all who could walk went straight
upstairs, the gravest cases went straight to the theatre or waited their
turn in the great hall, the others were accommodated on the ground
floor. We had a number of folding beds for emergency, and we had no
rules as to overcrowding. In the morning the authorities would clear out
as many patients as we wished. Sometimes we were hard put to it to
find room for them all, but we always managed somehow, and we
never refused admission to a single patient on the score of want of
room. The authorities soon discovered the capacity of the hospital for
dealing with really serious cases, and as a result our beds were crowded

with injuries of the gravest kind. What appealed to us far more was the
appreciation of the men themselves. We felt that we had not worked in
vain when we heard that the soldiers in the trenches begged to be taken
"a l'Hopital Anglais."
The condition of the men when they reached us was often pitiable in
the extreme. Most of them had been living in the trenches for weeks
exposed to all kinds of weather, their clothes were often sodden and
caked with dirt, and the men themselves showed clear traces of
exposure and insecure sleep. In most cases they had lain in the trenches
for hours after being wounded, for as a rule it is impossible to remove
the wounded at once with any degree of safety. Indeed, when the
fighting is at all severe they must lie till dark before it is safe for the
stretcher-bearers to go for them. This was so at Furnes, but at Antwerp
we were usually able to get them in within a few hours. Even a few
hours' delay with a bad wound may be a serious matter, and in every
serious case our attention was first directed to the condition of the
patient himself and not to his wound. Probably he had lost blood, his
injury had produced more or less shock, he had certainly been lying for
hours in pain. He had to be got warm, his circulation had to be restored,
he had to be saved from pain and protected from further shock. Hot
bottles, blankets, brandy, and morphia worked wonders in a very short
time, and one could then proceed to deal with wounds. Our patients
were young and vigorous, and their rate of recovery was extraordinary.
When a rush came we all had to work our hardest, and the scenes in
any part of the hospital required steady nerves; but perhaps the centre
of interest was the theatre. Here all the worst cases were brought--men
with ghastly injuries from which the most hardened might well turn
away in horror; men almost dead from loss of blood, or, worst of all,
with a tiny puncture in the wall of the abdomen which looks so
innocent, but which, in this war at least, means, apart from a difficult
and dangerous operation, a terrible death. With all these we had to deal
as rapidly and completely as possible, reducing each case to a form
which it would be practicable to nurse, where the patient would be free
from unnecessary pain, and where he would have the greatest possible
chance of ultimate recovery. Of course, all this was done under

anaesthesia. What a field hospital must have been before the days of
anaesthesia is too horrible to contemplate. Even in civil hospitals the
surgeons must have reached a degree of "Kultur" beside which its
present exponents are mere children. It is not so many years since a
famous surgeon, who was fond of walking back from his work at the
London Hospital along the Whitechapel Road, used to be pointed to
with horror by the Aldgate butchers, whose opinion on such a subject
was probably worth consideration. But now all that is changed. The
surgeon can be a human being again, and indeed, except when he goes
round his wards, his patients may