Working in a world of hurt by Carol Acton Jane Potter

Author:Carol Acton, Jane Potter [Carol Acton, Jane Potter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Social History, Technology & Engineering, Military Science
ISBN: 9780719090363
Google: wxPQyAEACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2015-01-15T03:12:33+00:00

Pavillard describes performing an appendectomy at Wampo with ‘no operating theatre’ on a ‘crude table out of bamboo’, with rudimentary surgical equipment: ‘three pairs of artery forceps, one rusty pair of scissors and some equally rusty surgical needles; also some gut and one large bottle of chloroform’. Borrowing a cut-throat razor from of one of the volunteer officers, Pavillard sterilises ‘our few instruments by boiling them in a four-gallon kerosene tin, and we also boiled bits of towel and old shirts to act as dressings’.

Then we started. The cut-throat razor was extremely sharp and I had to be very careful not to go too deep: it would have been very easy to go straight into the peritoneal cavity and injure the bowel. There was very little fat between the skin and the muscles and I came down to the peritoneum almost at once. I grazed it with forceps and very carefully opened it with the razor, using the handles of two bent spoons as retractors. Gently moving the coils of intestines, I found an ugly gangrenous appendix, looking as if it might burst at any moment. This was carefully removed and we buried the stump with a purse-string suture in the caecum and then closed the peritoneum, sutured the muscles, and finally closed the wound with linen stitches.90

These POW medical memoirists do not shirk from graphic descriptions. Philps describes how ulcers, if allowed to spread, could prove fatal, but two forms of treatment proved successful: one using a combination of potassium permanagnate, iodoform powder and salt-water compresses, a second, for the worst ulcers, ‘had to be quite horrible’. Surgery on ulcers had to be carried out without anaesthetics and the patient was subjected to scraping away of ‘the diseased tissue’ with a sharp spoon: ‘the agony of this requires no description’. And for Philps and his assistant, ‘the strain of doing this was such that, in one’s undernourished state, it was difficult to not to pass out’.91 MacCarthy’s own ‘primitive medical work’ included the removal of rotten teeth with pliers without anaesthetic, which ‘required courage, from both the doctor and patient’. More seriously, he had to operate on lung abscesses (empyema): First I cut into the lung over the site of the abscess with a razor blade, taking care not to puncture the lung. Then I planted a drainage needle, which was inserted through a hollow tube (tracula), both home made … These had been sterilized by immersion in potassium permanganate solution … Using a home-made syringe the pus was sucked out. The protruding tube was left to bubble through water in a bottle. Every three days I removed the equipment, sterilized it and reinserted the tube.92

Dead toes, the result of dry gangrene, had to be treated like rotten teeth, ‘with a quick snip of our pliers’.93

Adams recalls how the dental surgeon, Jimmy, would often assist in other operations. In the case of ‘a badly ulcerated leg’ that had to removed, ‘Jimmy would be holding it and would place it reverently on the wooden floor.

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