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 never know, of his existence. They go to sleep in a quiet
anteroom, and they waken up in the ward. Of the operation and all its
difficulties they know no more than their friends at home. Perhaps
even more wonderful is the newer method of spinal anaesthesia,
which we used largely for the difficult abdominal cases. With the