Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 205, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1919 — Doctors Remake Wounded Heroes [ARTICLE]

Doctors Remake Wounded Heroes

Red Cross Worker Tells of Marvels of Reconstruction • Surgery. EASY TO GIVE MAN NEW FACE Soldiers Brought to Hospital In France With Countenances Merely Blurs Sent Away With Normal Visages. ■ New York. —Miss Eva Hammond of the American Red Cross, who returned recently from Europe after nearly five years’ service with the allied armies, and who wears decorations of the British and French governments, told of the wonderful results achieved in reconstructive surgery by the surgeons of the American and allied armies. Miss Hammond, whose home is in San Francisco, was attached to the staff of the American Red Cross hospital In Neuilly, France.

“It is surprising how many things can be done to a man by a shell and leave him still living,” Miss Hammond said. “And the things that can be done to make it worth while for him to go on living are even more surprising. “Dental surgery is one profession that has gone ahead from the impetus of the war in leaps and bounds. The marvels that the doctors of dentistry performed were not entirely unknown before the war, but they were In the theoretical stagp. There was no chance to put these theories into practice, except in widely isolated cases. The war' proved that those theories were sound and practicable; It afforded them a means of development. There Is nothing impossible in dental surgery now.” *1 have seen men come into that hos-

pital of ours with bloody blurs where their faces haff been. Fed through tubes and kept alive, I have seen their remaining bits of skin stretched over the raw places, which filled 'with new flesh under careful treatment, and finally they have gone out into the world with new faces.

“There was one man, I remember, who came in to us with his entire face gone—nothing left but one eye. We fed him through a tube, built him a metal jaw, fitted withteethjand made him look Tike a human being again, except that he had no nose —only two nostrils. We found him a false nose and a pair of spectacles attached, hiding the scarred flesh around his missing eye, and making him look so much like another man that one would not have glanced at him a second time to note his deformity. “Another man came to us with the greater part of his face intact, but with no nose. It had been shot off completely, leaving his flesh fla-t from chin to forehead. We made him a nose to fit him. From the place where his nose had joined to his forehead there hung a little wisp of skin. This was pulled down, stretched every day, and kept dry and healthy by an antiseptic powder. Finally it grew to the correct length for a nose. Then we opened his wrist and grafted a piece of bone to the place where his nose should have been, binding arm and face together until the operation was completed. Then we adjusted the skin, which filled out with healthy flesh, and there was a new nose!” Easy to' Give Man New Face. A man whose face had been hanging down from below his eyes, Miss Hammond says, was a simple case. His face was sewn back in place. “I met him on the street in Paris,” she says, “just twp'days before I sailed, and his face looked just as usual, except for a slight scar which ran along under his eyes and across his

nose. In time it will almost disappear. A man who had been the victim' of a freak shell which had ripped out every one of his teeth, leaving him otherwise unharmed, was .supplied with new gums and a complete set of upper and lower false teeth. I have even seen a man with his brain bulging down over his eye from a jagged cut in his skull. The brain has been carefully pressed back In place, and the head fitted with a metal plate. This operation leaves the patient per- • fectly normal so far as his mental condition is concerned. He is, however, unable to go about much in the hot sun, as strong heat affects him, and he cannot drink because it irritates the brain.” Sometimes, Miss Hammond said, a patient would be brought into the hospital with his leg smashed to pieces. Instead of making a hurried amputation, every effort was made to save the injured limb. It was put into a frame, and in a short time the smashed bones would take a position, knit, and begin to grow together, while the splintered hits would gradually work their way out of the leg through the flesh.