Breastplate

During bloody World War I, Surgeon Kenneth Macfarlane Walker was a captain in Great Britain's Army Medical Corps. Statistically-minded, he noted that a third of the battlefield dead died of chest wounds, that as few as 3% of chest-wound victims reached a dressing station alive. Reason: even a tiny fragment of bomb or shell, piercing the chest cavity, can easily rip a large blood vessel, bring quick death.

Captain Walker knew that bullets account for less than 40% of battle casualties, that a cigaret case, a pocket Bible, a packet of love letters will sometimes stop a metal sliver. He concluded that a curved steel plate, easily slipped into a special pocket of a gas-mask container, would protect most of a man's precious lights.

Dr. Walker innocently sent a memorandum on the subject to British GHQ. Because he suggested that the curved plate, if equipped with a handle, might also make an entrenching tool, his memo came to rest in the Munitions Ministry's office of Trench Warfare Supplies. There it might have remained until the End of Wars had not his friend, the late Arthur Asquith, discovered it and showed it to Winston Churchill. Impressed, War Lord Churchill offered Walker the post of Expert in Light Armour to the Forces. Dr. Walker declined. "As I remembered that it had taken two years of agitation to induce the military authorities to accept the steel helmet, I . . . returned to my Field Ambulance." Back to bureaucratic limbo went the breastplate.

Last week Dr. Walker, now a distinguished Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and now in the midst of his second World War, once again brought forth his breastplate, this time in the British Medical Journal. He begged his colleagues to help "either in ridding me of a bee that has been buzzing in my bonnet for over 30 years, or in bringing [it] to the notice of the authorities."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.