World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Calling in Antwerp on our professional brethren was very delightful for
one's mind, but not a little trying for one's body. Their ideas of
entertainment were so lavish, and it was so difficult to refuse their
generosity, that it was a decided mistake to attempt two calls in the
same afternoon. To be greeted at one house with claret of a rare
vintage, and at the next with sweet champagne, especially when it is
plain that your host will be deeply pained if a drop is left, is rather
trying to a tea-drinking Briton. They were very good to us, and we
owed a great deal to their help. Most of all we owed to Dr. Morlet, for
he had taken radiographs of all our fractures, and of many others of
our cases. We went to see him one Sunday afternoon at his beautiful
house in the Avenue Plantin. He also had partly converted his house
into a hospital for the wounded, and we saw twenty or thirty of them in
a large drawing-room. The rest of the house was given up to the most
magnificent electro-therapeutical equipment I have ever seen or
heard of. We wandered through room after room filled with superb
apparatus for X-ray examinations, X-ray treatment, diathermy, and
electrical treatment of every known kind. It was not merely that
apparatus for all these methods was there. Whole rooms full of
apparatus were given up to each subject. It was the home of a genius
and an enthusiast, who thought no sum too great if it were to advance
his science. Little did we think that ten days later we should pick its
owner up upon the road from Antwerp, a homeless wanderer,
struggling along with his wife and his family, leaving behind
everything he possessed in the world, in the hope that he might save
them from the Germans. We heard from him not long ago that they
had carried off to Germany all the wonderful machinery on which he
had spent his life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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