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67 night, she hated with the fury of a woman the Geraman invader. The story ends with the young lady physician fighting furiously in battle. " handing death to the invader"; then a sniper’s bullet ends her life, the Red Surgeon is blinded and loses both arms. ’ This book is an excuse for propaganda about Russia. But Russia needs no propaganda. Her living deeds speak for themselves. and to build the story of her heroism and sacrifices around a rather unreal hero does scant justice to her. To illustrate the book there are some propaganda pictures ; frozen corpses, skeletons, and battered little children. Other horrors by the Nazis, some of which are beyond belief, are described ; the carving of the swastika on an old woman’s breast, the burying of children upright up to their necks and then stampeding horses across them. Undoubtedly the personal horrible small incident shocks and stirs, and these pictures are thus of some purpose. We are anæsthetic to mass figures and words like " 5 million dead" glide easily off the tongue. Borodin reckons that the British are poor haters ; that may be true, but propaganda milk needs to be very good if it is to make that cat.into a tiger... I recently dame across the following phrase in an American medical journal: " The dull routine of the daily after-breakfast visit ..." which set me thinking that for some of us the war has changed all that. It was pleasant to sit in the little roofless wooden hut which the RE’s in September, 1939, set up in a corner of the orchard in which our tents were pitched." A red- backed shrike started to build in a neighbouring tree next spring, and I would spend hours with my binoculars there. Two schools of thought arose at the onset, but 1 sided with that which held that hats should not be worn in such circumstances. It was unfortunately the duty as well as the joy of the farmer’s boy to remove the . buckets, which he did from behind and without warning. His," pardon Monsieur " was palpably insincere. Then to the Middle East. where, in what was then the largest camp in the world, things were so planned that no-one could be further than 200 yards from a latrine. As however a large proportion of us usually had " gippy tummy " this was no mean hazard on a dark night with tent-ropes and slit trenches to surmount. They were arranged in rows of eight seats (compartments were dispensed with here), loosely encircled with sacking -apparently a vain endeavour to confine to each of these units its proper quota of flies. It was in Iraq and Persia that we first got to know the " Squatter." This seatless product of our Hindu dependants results in a good physiological position, but has, its difficulties. The apparatus is encircled with rush matting which permits of sufficient infiltration by the rare local breezes to obviate the necessity for signposting, even on the darkest of nights. A further hazard in the shape of unmendly scorpions resunea in two casualtles. . On arrival in Malta. we became joyfully aware of the presence of water-closets. Our joy was modified how- ever on finding that, owing to the bombing, there was no longer any plumbing attached. We reverted to the deep trench as to an old friend. In Sicily we returned to nature for a period, owing to a lack of available RE’s or tools. It is doubtful anyway if either could have been of much assistance, since nowhere was rock more than 8 inches beneath the surface. This was quite fun at first (there were bushes), but soon it became an offence to heaven, and a period of voluntary constipation became fashionable, to avoid intimate contact with what was probably the heaviest fly offensive of the war. This stage lasted for several weeks, and aesthetic equilibrium was in fact never established. Now back in La Belle France-centre of all things civilised—we balance precariously along a 20 ft. pole beneath which is a bottomless pit. It is very sociable, but the preponderance in our diet of the excellent army biscuit renders our visits rare. It is rumoured that no case of peritonitis has yet occurred as the result of a perforating abdominal wound. Epilogue.—It was reserved for my first visit to a prisoner- of-war cage to make acquaintance with the biggest and best so far. It is a 60-seater, without undercarriage. It would have delighted the author of that little classic --The Specialist." Every seat was occupied, and a medical orderly was on watch art one end for signs of dysentery. Obituary CHARGES FERRIER WALTERS F R C S UF late years Bristol surgeons have known Charles Walters, consulting surgeon to the Royal Infirmary, as EMS group medical officer, and many will recall his watchful care of the injured as they arrived in hospitals on blitz nights. - Most of his life bad been spent in Bristol. After qualifying from the London Hospital in 1900 he returned there at once to undertake a long series of house appointments at the Royal Infirmary and the Royal Hospital for Sick Women and Children. Having gained his fellowship in 1904 he was appointed to the BRI surgical staff ; and he also demonstrated physiology in the medical school. During the war of 1914-18 he served in France at an emergency hospital and was one of the authors of an important paper, published in this journal in 1917, on :500 emergency operations for abdo- minal wounds. A surgeon of wide scope, he also wrote on intramedullary bone-pegging of fractures at a time when this.was a novelty ; he was on the staff of the Bristol Lock Hospital and was a leading spirit in starting the St. Brenda’s nursing-home for semi-private patients. Rising in due course to senior surgeon at the Royal Infirmary he won the affection of many generations of students. - " Walters was renowned for punctuality and rapidity," writes A. W. A.: " during a list of operations, he was apt to be halfway through the next before his house-surgeon joined him. But he was more than a hustling surgeon : -. a man of catholic interests, he would weigh in with apt contributions to discussions on philosophy and meta- physics. He was never happier, however, than when wrestling with the mysteries of bis monster car ; or building a snug cottage for his family out of the local clay in the combe he had discovered for himself on the Bristol Channel. Here Piggy’ welcomed house-sur- geons and nurses, and some of us remember, many autumns ago, a grand bonfire of the shrubs and light timber cleared for the foundations." Mr. Walters died on Christmas Eve, at the age of 69. His widow survives him with their daughter and an only son now serving in the RAMC. THEOPHILUS NICHOLAS KELYNACK M D VICT., M R C P Dr. Kelynack, who died on Dec. 23, was a son of the Rev. N. Kelynack, and was born at Wells, Somerset, in 1866. After , preparatory education he proceeded to University College School in its old premises in Gower Street-a school which has produced a goodly number of eminent medical practi- tioners. Forsaking London, he took his professional course at Owens College, Manchester. graduating MB with distinc- tion in 1889, and MD with the gold medal in 1893. His early days of professional life were spent holding various appoint- ments in the Royal Infirmary of Manchester, where he soon became pathologist and medical registrar ; here he showed his keenness in pathology, and closely studied the vermiform appendix, publishing a valu- able work on the pathology of that organ. He showed also his ability as a teacher and was appointed an assistant lecturer on pathology, and assistant to the then professor of medicine. Coming back to London, he obtained the coveted office of physician to Mount Vernon Hospital. an institution so eminently associated with the study and treatment of tuberculosis. His position there and hb energetic research into all aspects of infection with the tubercle bacillus enabled him to become a recognised expert, and he wrote much which was highly useful on this disease, all too prevalent in those days. He was a skilled editor of the British Journal of Tuberculosis for 27 vears, and also of the periodical Child from
