ry.

* * * * *

No one comes away from La Panne, at least no one should, without
having visited the great hospital founded by Dr. Leon du Page, the
famous Belgian surgeon. It started in one of the big tourist hotels
facing on the sea, but it has gradually expanded until it now occupies
a whole congeries of buildings. It has upward of a thousand beds, but,
as the fighting was comparatively light at the time I was there, only
about two-thirds of them were occupied. Though the American Ambulance
at Neuilly, and some of the hospitals at the British base-camps are
larger, Dr. du Page's hospital is the most complete and self-contained
that I have seen on any front. To mend the broken men who are brought
there no device of medical science has been left untried. There are
giant magnets which are used to draw minute steel fragments from the
brains of men wounded by shrapnel; there are beds, heated by hundreds
of electric lights, for soldiers whose vitality has been dangerously
lowered by shock or exhaustion; there is a department of facial
surgery where men who have lost their noses or their jaws or even
their faces are given new ones. The hospital is, as I have said,
self-contained. The operating-tables, the beds, all the furniture, in
fact, is made on the premises. It is the only hospital I know of which
provides those patients who have lost their legs with artificial
limbs. And they are by far the best artificial limbs that I have seen
anywhere. Each one is made to order to match the man's remaining limb.
They are shaped over plaster casts, according to a system originated
by Dr. du Page, in alternate layers of glue and ordinary shavings, and
the articulation of the joints almost equals that of nature. As a
result the soldiers are sent out into the world provided with legs
which are symmetrical, almost unbreakable, amazingly light, and so
admirably constructed that the owner rarely requires the assistance of
a cane. Another detail for which Dr. du Page has made provision is the
manufacture of his own instruments. Before the war the best surgical
instruments were made in Germany. There were, so far as Dr. du Page
knew, only five first-class instrument-makers in Belgium. Three of
these were, he ascertained, in the army, so through the King he
obtained their release from military duty. Now they work in a
completely equipped shop in the rear of the hospital making the shiny,
terrifying instruments