Surgeon in Hawaii

Colonel John Joseph Moorhead, professor of surgery at New York Post-Graduate Medical School, stood in a Honolulu auditorium on the morning of Dec. 7 giving a group of Army and Navy doctors the last of three lectures on war surgery.

His text was Be ye also ready. ... He had barely started when the secretary of the Medical Society rushed down the aisle and shouted, "Ten surgeons are needed at once at Tripler General Hospital!" Twenty minutes later Colonel Moorhead was in the operating room and remained there for over ten hours.

Last week Colonel Moorhead returned to Manhattan, told how his lessons were put into practice:

By Sunday evening almost all the 960 casualties had been treated. Dr. Moorhead attributed this remarkable success to a sixfold program: 1) prompt transportation of the wounded to hospitals; 2) generous use of transfusions (there was a large supply of stored blood in Honolulu); 3) thorough debridement (trimming) of all injured tissue--if allowed to remain it dies, becomes a breeding ground for gangrene germs; 4) no suturing, even of big wounds --if left alone, new tissue grows up rapidly; 5) liberal use of sulfa drugs; 6) painstaking care after operation.

Of great help was a remarkable new foreign-body detector which Dr. Moorhead had with him. It was invented by Samuel Berman, a research engineer in the New York City Transit Department. The cigar-sized instrument works on the principle of a radio tube; when held over a wounded man a long, pencil-like apparatus shows on a recording dial the presence and exact location of a metallic substance in the body. Dr. Moorhead's detector is the only one that has been made; it is still in Honolulu. Said he: "It proved invaluable for saving precious time in X-raying and probing. I intend to advise its manufacture in quantity for distribution everywhere."

Other medical news received from Navy doctors in Honolulu last week: > More than 60% of the injuries were burns. Most of these were "flash" burns (instantaneous) on bare legs and arms. If the sailors had worn long pants and sleeves, said the doctors, they might not have been hurt. Three types of treatment were used: 1) dressings soaked in mineral oil and sulfa drugs; 2) bandages dipped in gun tubs filled with tannic acid; 3) tannic-acid jelly. (Plain sulfa powders were discontinued because they caked on wounds.) > Newly made morphine "syrettes," ampules filled with morphine and fitted with sterile hypodermic needles enclosed in glass tubes, were great timesavers. > Since mouth and jaw injuries were rare, Navy dentists took over doctors' first-aid jobs, administrative work. Navy doctors and dentists last week urged that sailors receive more first-aid training, that large ships have 15 or 20 first-aid posts, small ships at least half a dozen. > Even though the enemy used no gas, masks were necessary because of thick black smoke from fuel-oil fires. Many men were overcome by lack of oxygen when they rushed into compartments where bombs had exploded.

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