What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries by George Biro and Jim Leavesley Read Free Book Online Page A

later.
    The Sydney Morning Herald mourned ‘the loss of one of our great ones’.
    The influential British Medical Journal said:
    The influence of Sister Kenny on the treatment of infantile paralysis has been exceedingly beneficial…in an empirical way she hit on much that was good in the treatment of poliomyelitis, and…wakened orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists the world over.
    Sadly Elizabeth Kenny herself did not live to see this blessing by the medical establishment. The world has gradually accepted modifications of her teaching on the treatment of polio.
    (GB)
Paul White, Jungle Doctor
    Dr Paul White, the Jungle Doctor from Australia, earned for his work in the 1930s in Tanganyika, East Africa. There, despite his lifelong asthma, he was far more than a medical missionary: he was a surgeon, anaesthetist, pathologist, pharmacist, handyman and building supervisor.
    Dr White learnt his first lessons in hygiene and public health as a small boy in Bowral:
    Before dawn, each Friday, a shadowy figure would come to our outhouse and play his key part in our pan-and-fly hygiene system. He was also our mayor, carrying off all his ceremonial duties spruce and shining in his robes of office.
    At a Christmas party, one of my mother’s staidest friends asked me for a poem. I recited one our mayor had left us:
    ‘Although the police keep order
    There’s no more useful man
    Than the bloke who comes at sunrise
    And juggles with the pan.’
    To my amazement, they stopped me.
    In 1921, his widowed mother and young Paul moved to Sydney. At Sydney Grammar School, he became a runner, cricketer and active Christian. He started his medical course in 1929, at the height of the Depression.
    Paul gained a University Blue in 1931 and 1932.
    In my third year, I ran in the Intervarsity athletics. A Melbourne runner, Wellesley Hannah, beat me over the mile. Then I found that he was also a committed Christian. This friendship was to change both our lives.
    As medical students, we followed the desperate search for weapons against the great killers like pneumonia and meningitis.
    I felt especially bitter about meningitis which had killed my father.
    By the time I graduated in 1935, I’d decided to work as a medical missionary in East Africa. First I spent one year at Royal North Shore Hospital, where our training included infectious diseases and obstetrics. For anaesthetics, we used the old ether with a rag and bottle.
    As interns we earned eleven [shillings] and threepence a week and had every third weekend off.
    In my spare time, I practised tracheotomy [emergency opening of the windpipe to bypass blockage] on an old piece of garden hose. Soon after, I had to do the real thing on a small boy who had severe diphtheria and couldn’t breathe.
    He met many challenges during his preparations:
    Most of our equipment was borrowed: if we couldn’t get it, we had to make it; if we couldn’t make it, we had to go without. Mosquito nets were crucial, since mosquitoes transmit malaria, yellow fever, dengue and elephantiasis.
    Among the things he learned: keeping a corrugated-iron roof cool, making a surgical retractor from two bent spoons, driving through mud or sand, and plugging a hole in a radiator or petrol tank.
    In 1937 Dr White, with his wife Mary and son David, sailed to Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Then to Dodoma and Mvumi.
    Sechela the head nurse welcomed us with her story of a cobra emerging from its hole to watch her delivering twins.
    Over 100 people came for my first outpatient session; some walked 50 kilometres. Relatives led the elderly who were blinded by cataracts. We had so few medicine bottles that people brought their own.
    Those with malaria shivered in the scorching sun. Our only antimalarial was quinine, which we bought from the Tanganyika Post Office for two shillings per 100 tablets.
    Our operating room of granite, cement and corrugated iron cost 120 pounds. A burly African pedalling a jacked-up