BEFORE AND AFTER LISTER 153 



People sometimes imagine that a practising physi- 

 cian can be transformed into an army surgeon merely 

 by putting a uniform on him. I was not lacking in 

 ordinary intelligence and was willing to work, but I 

 was utterly without training. To get those two 

 churches ready as hospitals I had to have beds, mat- 

 tresses, sheets, pillow-cases, chairs, tables, kitchen 

 utensils, knives, forks, spoons, peppers and salts, all 

 sorts of crockery and other necessities for a dining- 

 room, all the drugs, appliances and instruments 

 needed for two hundred sick and wounded men; I 

 needed orderlies, cooks and the endless odds and ends 

 of things which go to make up a well-organized hos- 

 pital. I did not know how to get a single one of 

 these requisites. As to drugs, I did not know whether 

 to order six ounces or a gallon of laudanum, an 

 ounce or two or a pound or two of opium, and I was 

 in utter darkness as to the mode of getting any of 

 the other things from a teaspoon to a cook. How- 

 ever, I inquired and as soon as I learned how, I set 

 myself to work. For two nights I slept only about 

 three hours each, and I had the satisfaction of report- 

 ing to Dr. Letterman at the end of three days, instead 

 of five, that I was ready. On the fourth day I had 

 one hundred wounded men in each hospital. 1 



I congratulate you in this more enlightened age and 

 as students in this fine school where you are trained and 

 drilled in matters which we had to cope with in our stumb- 

 ling way, by dint of desperately hard work, without 

 guidance, often learning only by our bitter mistakes. 



We, the few surgeons still surviving those momentous 

 four years, may well say to you Morituri salutamus. 



I have been so very fortunate as to live during the 

 whole period of the greatest revolution surgery has ever 

 passed through. How strange seem these words of 



1 Keen, Addresses and Other Papers, 1905, p. 424. 



