38 THE SPECULUM May, 191n.
drive them off. Two days later the papers say it was reported that the Zeppelins had visited the East Coast.
Indeed the, war dogs are chewing at their very pluck.
"zoI."
profane claimants for a shell case when the advent of more cases and contents scattered us. Since I had rather be adjudged amongst the wick than numbered with the dead, I went home, and consumed a quiet tea of biscuits, rice and marmalade;
and so to bed..
Wednesday.—On duty at the hospital tents. A normal day save for the incident of some 'shrapnel through the fly. Being a nervous youth, I spilt an ounce of S.V.G., and the dispenser was more than suspicious when I applied for the repeat dose.
It was not until he had smelt my breath' that I could thank God for my purity. Mail day, but only a month's old Table Talk for me. A page of pictures of cold•footed, sea-side slackers, we passed on to patient with our blessing, a handful of No. 9, and a generous dose of 01. Ricini.
Thursday.—More pick and shovel work and filling sand- bags for our cook-house lest Abdul should mix our evening stew with shrapnel and turn our dixies into sieves. Onto night duty, six to six, on the tents. Little to do save marvel at the Australian language--picutresque, even from the mouths of slumbering soldiers.
Friday.—Spent the morning slumbering, in so far as per- mitted by the flies and body fauna. In the afternoon, wrote home and cut the remnants of a greasy pack to see which lass to favour. Turned up an ace on Yvette—a sweet Cairenne_
and so I sent a sad epistle off to Egypt. She is now enamoured of one Percy, a sergeant in the Pay Corps, "so handsome, but
so shy !" Gott strafe Percival!
"A laggard in love, and a laggard in war, What the hell's he in khaki for?"
Saturday.—Dressing Station. A quiet day until late in the afternoon, when the artillery rally gave us all the work we Wanted. Crowded moments such as these atone for what- ever times we may have missed with Doris at Sorrento or Marie down at Lorne. The first case is smashed beyond us, and another goes out as we dress a shattered leg. Yet the wounded come and go with jests and cheerful curses choking back their groans. With a tourniquet biting into his thigh, one gasped, "Thought you medical blokes objected to tight gar- ters!" Another with his forearm hanging by a tendon, was mostly concerned over the loss of some unread letters—the Padre (one of the best) arranges to send them on. One badly- smashed humourist was laying evens on his chance of seeing the Melbourne Cup, and another, minus half a leg, was bemoan- ing his loss to Collingwood. We even may receive occasional
11111011111•11
40 THE SPECULUM. May, 1916.
thanks, for in return for my last cigarette a big Queenslander observed: "You cold footed, Red Crossed blighters ain't bad poor blighters"—but it wasn't blighters he called us! A quiet evening—
"—quiet 'omesick talks between
Men, met by night, you never knew."
From a scientific discussion, as to whether the nitrogenous excess of bully beef was responsible for trench diarrhoea, we gradually wandered into the Soldiers' Trinity of Topics — Wine, Women, and War. Assuredly three great Adventures, whilst a fourth most vigilantly awaits us,-
" 'Earing 'im pass so busy over-'ead, Old Nickel Neck, 'oo isn't on the Staff, There's one above is greater than us all."
In Hospital.
Sunday.—Awakened before daybreak for what the Scotch philosopher in the next bed calls our "matutinal ablution."
Thereafter slept till breakfast—an orgy on milk. A quiet morn and the welcome news from the M.O. that I could arise for twenty minutes on the morrow. The inevitable fly in the oint- ment appeared, and the sister told me I could put in the time scrubbing the top of my locker, which she characterised as filthy, and emphasised her remarks by ringing in the cocoa stains with indelible pencil. Women—ye gods ! Dozed after a beef tea carouse for dinner, and then another lactic festival fcr tea. Supper was announced by a cheerful orderly, who remarked, "Ah, cookoo, choom," which, being interpreted, meaneth, "Say, cobber, d'you want any blinking cocoa?" So once again to sleep.
Illonday.—Discovered in the ward a really live Australian
—a travelled connoisseur in seaside damsels. For hours he told me tales of Cottesloe and Coogee, Bondi, Bellerive and Brighton, Sandringham, and Semaphore.
So we mourned together whilst what some damned fool calls the "turquoise blue of the ever-smiling Mediterranean"
mocked our memories of sunnier Southern seas.
It was all Australia to me, All I had found or missed, Every face I was crazy to see,
And every woman I'd kissed;
All that I shouldn't ha' done, God knows (As He knows I'll do it again)."
That night in phantasy we wandered intertwined a deux towards Bluefish Hill or down the Frankston Road, whilst the lass from Sandy Bay or Subiaco was most particularly sweet.
Tuesday.—The Sydney seaside savant, a pearl fisher from Broome, a Newfoundlander, a New Zealander, and myself have developed a Colonial clique, with a Canadian sister as Patroness. Our discussions are an education to the average Tommy in the ward, who "thinks the Empire still is the Strand and Holborn Hill." Time alone will tell whether our seed has fallen upon good ground, but our six bob a day impresses the Englishman with the possibilities of immigration, and his war-tour has lifted him out of the awful rut of English life.
None the less, we preach daily our doctrine of salvation by Empire, and the Canuck sister deals out 01. Ricini to the sceptical.
Wednesday.—A wild and most eventful day. From our ward sister through the orderly, under the direction of the wardmaster, we received our weekly two-bob chits, duly signed by our M.O., countersigned by the A.djutant, checked at the Orderly Office, initialled by the Canteen Sergeant, and stamped by the Canteen Clerk. Thus respectably clad in pyjamas and red tape, we adjourned statim to the canteen and invested in lemonade, chocolate and cigarettes. Thus generally we lived the life, and that eve with especial fervour we offered up our prayer : "Lead us not into temptation."
Thursday.—Recovering from yesterday.
Friday.—An unfortunate event, when a sister introduced me to a thermometer and sweetly begged my aid in her diurnal round of arduous duties. (She is Irish, and has kissed more than the Blarney Stone.) Maudlin mirth on my tour through the wards, and pointed remarks about the figure, form and possibilities of the new sister. Since revenge is sweet, I re- ported an epidemic of constipation, and hilarity died as the Sister appeared with a particularly obnoxious Mist. Cascara.
Saturday.—An English sister having accused Australians of a Cockney accent, we convened a special meeting of our Overseas Club to discuss the English Tower of Babel. Since the Newfoundlander has the Yankee twang, and the New Zea- lander speaks Scots, we Australians claimed a purity of speech, of which we were none too sure. We broke up in disorder, nor could we gain satisfaction from a Scotch doctor, a Cana- dian sister, a V.A.D. nurse from Girton, a Northumberland orderly, and a ward full of men with every dialect of the Old Dart. In the afternoon a convalescent crowd left for England.
42 14-1E SPECULUM. May, 1916.
The Sydneysider knows his Kipling, and as the Tommies straggled off in their ragged, war-worn' khaki, he found, as usual, the words for the occasion—
"We've 'ad the same old temp'rature—the same relapses, too—
The same old saw-backed fever chart. Good-bye—Good luck to you !"
50403.
ORIGIN OF THE RED CROSS.
Professor Palasciano, of Naples Medical School, in 1861, read a paper entitled "La Neutralita dei Feriti in Tempo di Guerra," in which, with arguments both humanitarian and technical, he called upon belligerent powers to recognise on the battlefielcl a reciprocal neutrality in aid of wounded. Not content with enunciating such a proposal, Prof. Palasciano developed the following scheme for securing the neutrality desirated :-
(i.) That belligerent armies should reciprocally give up all wounded prisoners immediately after battle.
(ii.) Wounded that could not be given up, to be treated by the respective ambulance corps.
(iii.) Ambulance corps should be ,furnished with safe con- duct to pass the hostile frontier and remain there only as long as necessary for the treatment of wounded.
Prof. Palasciano continued his compaign in every possible way, and, in logical sequence of his propaganda, there arose the Geneva Society, which culminated into the Geneva Con- vention in 1864. Out of this grew the Committee of the Red Cross, having its seat at Geneva, to which branches were affili- ated from nearly every civilised nation. A monument to the Professor stands in the Campo Santo at Naples, a granite tomb, above which rises a great marble cross, inscribed with the words :—
"Quod Deus conjunxit, homo non separet."
Hail. Hymen.
"I would sooner die fighting."—Springy's address to 4th Year Students, Tuesday.
Lieut.-Colonel Springthorpe was married on Wednesday evening to Miss Daisy E. Johnstone.
0 brighter Venus! 0 our greater Mars ! In harmony and concord move your stars!
Is man the finished work of art divine Decreed in endless discord to repine ? Stay! Entertain no mischievous surmise, Omnipotence is just and man is wise!
Hail, Hymen ! Hymenaeus, hail!
Hail, Hymen, Hymenaeus!
"Though Truth foreknow Love's heart and Hope foretell, And Fame be for Love's sake desirable,
And Youth be sweet and Life be dear to Love, Love's throne is not with them," for far above The Ego rises martially inclined,
Marking a stern inexorable mind.
Hail, Hymen! Hymenaeus, hail!
Hail, Hymen, Hymenaeus!
No more the wanton nights, no.more the days When Love betwixt the horns of Bacchus plays;
No more the gay grisette, no more the eyes That half consent whilst Modesty denies ; No more the thrilling sly praecordial glance When Moet sparkles and when tapers dance.
Hail, Hymen ! Hymenaeus, hail!
Hail, Hymen, Hymenaeus!
In these distracted times when each man dreads The bloody stratagems of warring heads, Behold the Colonel's creed hung out on high—
"Give me to love and let me fighting die;"
So here's a health to such propitiousness—
Our Lady and her Sir John William S.
Hail, Hymen ! Hymenaeus, hail!
Hail, Hymen, Hymenaeus !
POST-PARTUM.
44 THE SPECULUM. May, 1916.
The Late Sir William Turner.
Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
By Prof. R. J. A. Berry.
That the Editor of "The Speculum"—a journal published in a city 12,000 miles from the University so long associated with the name of Turner—should have requested an obituary notice of Edinburgh's veteran Professor of Anatomy, is per- haps the best proof one could have of the late Sir William's world-wide reputation.
It is 'a matter of common belief that Edinburgh chairs are a close corporation exclusively reserved for Edinburgh men. This is not so. Edinburgh is as cosmopolitan in its Professors as in its students, and Turner himself is a case in point. He never studied as a student in the University whose destinies he subsequently so long and ably guided. He was not even a Scotchman.
Born in the county town of Lancaster, in the year 1832, he enrolled as a student of medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and was admitted to membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1853. In the following year, 1854, he was called to Edinburgh, to act as demonstrator to the then Professor of Anatomy, John Goodsir, and so commenced Turner's sixty-two years' association with the University of Edinburgh—a record which has seldom been equalled, and surely never surpassed. Turner combined his duties as de- monstrator in Edinburgh with his medical studies in London, and took the degree of M.B. in the latter University in 1857.
The subsequent milestones in his career were his appointment to the Chair of Anatomy in the year 1867, his knighthood by Her late Majesty Queen Victoria, in 1886, his creation as a K.C.B. in 19o1, his translation from the Chair of Anatomy to the Principalship of the University, at the age of 71, and his cessation of work at the call of death in the current year.
Whatever his faults—and none of us are without them—
Turner's career may well form a model for the younger and rising generation. His scientific attainments and achievements won for him honorary degrees from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham, Montreal, Toronto, Glasgow, and St. Andrew's, and many learned and scientific societies, in all European countries, and America, elected him to their Fellow- ships, whilst his fellow scientists in Great Britain conferred upon him in 190o the blue ribbon of Science in the form of
the Presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
As a man of affairs, Turner was unrivalled. His Univer- sity recognised his marked administrative abilities once in 1873, when it elected him its representative on the General Medical Council, and again in 1903, when it raised him to the principalship. His colleagues on the General Medical Council endorsed the opinion of Edinburgh when they subse- quently elected Turner as their President in succession to the late Sir Richard Quain. Nor was this long and honourable service on the General Medical Council Turner's only claim to administrative and organising capacity. For many years he was a member of the University Court—the equivalent of our own University Council—and to his immense business aptitude, Edinburgh owes the transference of its medical school from the old University buildings to its pre- sent site alongside the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Turner, too, secured for the Alma Mater of his adoption, that magni- ficent building—the pride and glory of every Edinburgh graduate—the McEwan Hall.
His contributions to anatomical and anthropological litera- ture would almost fill, even if only the titles were given, an entire number of "The Speculum." Suffice it to say that his work on "The Convolutions of the Human Cerebrum, Topo- graphically Considered," and his "Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of the Placenta," are classics—in fact, a well-known work on Embryology once called him "the grand master of placental research."
Turner was also an unrivalled craniologist and anthro- pologist, and even after his Both year was engaged in a study of the craniology of the Tasmanian aboriginal.
What may, perhaps, be of more direct interest to our Melbourne students of medicine is some account of Turner's influence on anatomy. This was really extraordinary. At a farewell dinner given to the present writer in Edinburgh, in December, 1905, it was pointed out that Turner's pupils occu- pied 5o per cent. of all home Chairs of Anatomy, and 75 per cent. of those overseas. Even at the present moment, some thirteen years after Turner's retirement from Anatomy, pupils of Turner's are to be found occupying Chairs of Anatomy in Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrew's, Durham, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Belfast, Capetown, Cardiff, Sydney, and Melbourne. Naturally—though some are inclined to be scep- tical thereon—the science which Turner taught and adorned has been profoundly modified since his early days. The old
46 THE SPECULUM. May, 1916.
descriptive and morphological type of Anatomy is giving way to a clinical and philosophical science which now is incomplete without histology, embryology and physical anthropology. The anatomy of Elliot Smith and Keith is as different from that of Goodsir as are night and day. Anatomy, too, since Turner's time, has ceased to be a study of the dead ; it has become a study of life, and as such is as mutable and changeful as life itself. To look back, as I sometimes do, on the anatomy of my student's days, and compare it with that of to-day in Glas- gow, Manchester, Sydney and Melbourne, is an interesting and instructive experience. The tracts of the cord, the nomen- clature, the shapes, functions and positions of viscera, the cell, the embedding of the ovum, the phylogenetic history of the cortex cerebri, the autonomic nervous system, were to us, in 1886, as uncharted rocks in an ocean of doubt. Modern teaching appliances, such as the Zeiss projection apparatus, the microphotographic apparatus, the Leitz, the dissecting microscope, the stereoscope, were things unknown, but we were, on the other hand, only too familiar with "maggots and mush,"
as I once heard a too fastidious fellow student describe his so-called "part."
Turner belongs to a race of anatomical giants. The Chair which he graced so long has a distinguished history, in the making of which Turner proved himself worthy of his anatomi- cal ancestors. The Chair of Anatomy was founded in Edin- burgh, at first in a tentative way, in 1705, and permanently in 1720. The three occupants of the Chair between the years just mentioned, Robert Elliott, Adam Drummond, and John M'Gill, were borrowed by the University of Edinburgh from the older and sister institution in the same city, the College of Surgeons. Herein lies one of the mysteries of Edinburgh which no Melbourne man ever understands. From that day to this there have existed in Edinbugh two entirely different medical bodies, the one granting what is locally and contemptu- ously referred to as "a license to kill," and the other being the stately University of Edinburgh itself. They are as dis- tinct and apart as are "Rickards" and "the shop." The Edin- burgh "coijoint" is patronised chiefly by babus from India and
"stickit" students from all parts of the world, the other by thinking and earnest men from Great and Greater Britain who are as proud of their University and as jealous of its degrees as are, I trust, our own students of their own University. It must then be borne in mind that, when the youth who cannot pa3s his own University examinations disappears to Edin- burgh, and returns in a few months or years, with what he
terms his "degree," he has never darkened the doors of the University of Edinburgh.
In 172o the Chair of ,Anatomy in the Edinburgh Univer- sity was permanently created, and there was called to it the first of the Monros, the "father of the Edinburgh Medical School." He was the first Professor of Anatomy in Edin- burgh to lecture in English, and he was the first Edinburgh Professor of any kind who, by the excellence of his teaching, drew great attention to the University of Edinburgh from without, and so gave it the beginning of its celebrity. His course extended from October to May, and embraced surgery as well as anatomy. After occupying the Chair for 38 years, Monro primus was succeeded by his son, the still more cele- brated Monro secundus. Here was a genius, and it is related of him in the official "Story of the University of Edinburgh"
that "the novelty of his manner, combined with the clearness of his style, is described by one who was present as having acted like an electric shock on the audience. It was at once seen that he was a master of his subject, and of the art of com- municating knowledge to others." So great was the genius of Monro secundus that his classes rose from 194 in the first decade, to 287 during the second decade, to 342 during the third decade, culminating in the early years of the nineteenth century in a class of 400. To this era belongs the really great period of Edinburgh as a medical school.
In 1798 Monro tertius acted jointly with his father, and from 1808 to 1846 alone. Here is one of the most classic in- stances of despotism in the annals of medicine. The Monros, grandfather, father and son, occupied the Chair of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh for no less than 126 years, and for 111 years they retained the teaching of surgery also in their hands. The period was too long, for unfortunately Monro tertius was the fool of the family, and his occupancy of the Chair was a failure. He was apathetic, and apathy in a teacher cannot stir up enthusiasm in a student. He lost command of his class, which in his latter years, became the frequent scene of disturbance and uproar.
In his time, too, though without any connivance on his part, the unfortunate victims of the infamous Burke and Hare murders were brought as "subjects" to the dissecting room.
By a retribution of justice, as rare as it was well merited, the skeleton of Burke is still to be seen in the museum of the Anatomy Department of the University of Edinburgh.
In 1846, succeeded to the third Munro, the great John