Books: Speaking of Operations

BURMA SURGEON — Gordon S. Sea-grave—Norton ($3).

The Dr. Seagrave who came out of Burma with General Stilwell (TIME, July 20, 1942) has published a book. He is no writer. But he is a man of such heart and energy and action that his 295-page book, jammed with adventure and medical science, is intensely affecting.

The Ugly Doctor. In 1902, when Gordon Stifler Seagrave was five years old, he decided to become a medical missionary in the Shan States of Burma. Twenty years later, with Johns Hopkins Medical School behind him, he began. The American Baptist Foreign Mission sent him and his wife “Tiny” to take charge of a 20-bed hospital at Namkham, a village near the Chinese border on the not-yet-built Burma Road.

Burma was not new to the doctor — his grandfather had been a Baptist missionary there, his father was still a missionary in Rangoon, he himself had been born in Burma. But Namkham, its people and dialects were new. And the hospital was filthy. “The floor was stained with blood and pus and medicine, and was so rotten you had to step carefully not to break through. . . . The walls were covered with large red splashes of the saliva of betel-nut chewers. All the window ledges were covered with nasal secreta which the patients blow on their fingers and then carefully wipe off on the nearest projection. . . . That night Marion and I broke down and sobbed in each other’s arms.”

The doctor, who calls himself “short and ugly,” settled down next day to mastering the hospital and the people around it. He and Tiny scrubbed the hospital. He already knew Karen and a little Burmese and started learning other local dialects, while Tiny learned to deliver babies and pour chloroform. There was little money, often a shortage of drugs, always a shortage of trained personnel. The only surgical instruments Dr. Seagrave had were a wastebasketful he had begged at Johns Hopkins when he saw a nurse about to throw them away. His practice covered hundreds of miles.

Unusual Nurses. Dr. Seagrave made nurses out of native girls belonging to “ten or twelve races . . . each with their own language entirely unintelligible to the other race groups.” Of the first two nurses, one was daughter of a village “torture-expert,” the other a girl who had failed all her studies in school. All were little things weighing from 80 to 110 pounds. All eventually learned Burmese, and some learned English. They were excellent nurses when Seagrave got through, and to everyone’s surprise the 30 or so who walked from Burma into Assam behind Stilwell stood the trip better than any of the other marchers.

Seagrave often found it expedient to give his nurses unusual responsibility: they gave hypodermics, anesthesia, made diagnoses, delivered babies, drove ambu lances, took full charge of small, outlying hospitals, and in a pinch oven did surgery (under his eye). With the aid of these girls and the local masons, the doctor built a 100-bed hospital out of local cobblestone for $20,000. He followed it with a nurses’ home and, finally, a cottage for himself—just in time for the Japs to take over.

Peculiar Praying. Winning the people to the healing art was not easy. He claims he finally won his popularity by luck on several cases. He predicted that a certain man would die of tuberculosis in a year and one year later, to the day, he died. One native sowbwa (chief) was already getting well of malaria (though he did not know it) when the doctor came. Dr. Seagrave got “the credit for a marvelous cure.”

In telling of his early surgical cases, Dr. Seagrave reveals a side of the surgeon which few laymen realize exists: “I looked forward with dread to every new operation I had to do. But I never had any overwhelming love for a quitter. When a new operation needed to be done, I got out my books and studied every detail. Then I was profusely sick, went to bed on it, and the next morning, still nauseated, started operating. . . .”

Building the Road. Until the war came, Seagrave’s worst worry was malaria. Nearly as worrisome were the narrow, precipice-hugging, sandy or muddy roads, which hampered his movements when he wanted to visit an outpost clinic. He was glad to see the building of the Burma Road, but that was heartbreaking too. “Even on that short stretch of road there must have been 10,000 coolies at work. The hillsides were black with them: Chinese, Shans, Kachins. Huge goiters hampered their work. Dozens were lying by the road shaking with fever. In the rockiest parts coolies were tediously drilling holes in the hard limestone cliffs in which crude gunpowder could be packed for blasting. There was no dynamite. . . . And they smoothed the road with their hands! Little loving pats!”

Over the border at Loiwing, China, an aircraft factory sprang up. run mostly by Americans. Dr. Seagrave agreed to run the hospital attached to it and it was there, in October 1940, that he did his first war surgery. Hundreds of Chinese were wounded, and seriously—they had not had enough experience with Japanese bombing to lie down.

The head of the Loiwing hospital’s Department of Internal Medicine folded up and sobbed while Seagrave and a Chinese doctor operated on the terrible wounds.

On the eve of Dec. 7, 1941, Dr. Seagrave slept without a mosquito net. He has not been free of malaria since. When the bombing of Rangoon began and the American women and children were ordered out of Burma, Mrs. Seagrave reluctantly agreed to go (she had malaria too).

Just Ahead of the Japs. Dr. Seagrave organized a medical unit to work with the British Army. Before he was through he had several small hospitals in eastern Burma, each with a nurse in charge, and a base hospital near the middle. His patients were the Chinese Sixth Army, then holding a 300-mile front. “What kind of men did these British think we were, anyway, giving us a job of that size? After refusing us the dignity of the title of Mobile Hospital Unit they were ordering us to be a whole confounded medical corps!” Two other missionary doctors helped.

Dr. Seagrave joked about the British demands, but when General Stilwell ar rived to take charge of the Chinese arm ies in Burma at the end of March 1942, the doctor promptly asked to be allowed to take care of the Fifth Army in central Burma as well. The general agreed and made him a major. He is now a lieutenant colonel.

Then the heavy work began. The Friends’ Ambulance Units hunted out and brought in the wounded. They arrived in huge bunches, 25, 50, 80 at a time, and when the operating staff were getting a short sleep, 40 more would be brought in. “Friends are the funniest Englishmen I ever met. They pick those blood-covered patients up in their arms as if they were sweet and lovely.”

The Girls Go To It. At first, for lack of surgeons, Seagrave let the nurses help. “As fire began to sweep the town” (one of the many to which Seagrave moved his base) “we returned to our operating tables. … I simply could not locate the bullet in the thigh of one of our Chinese patients. ‘Here, let me have a try,’ said Koi. She inserted one tiny finger in the wound, using it as a guide for a long forceps, and out came the bullet! ‘Listen, woman, what are you helping me for? You take over this table and do your own darned operations ! ‘ . . . Kyang Tswi and Ruth were getting along pretty well also. . . . Little Bawk and I handled the worst cases. . . . Just as we were really going to town I looked up and saw General Stilwell standing in the doorway! The room behind him was littered with the patients we had been operating on. … Nurses were receiving patients from the trucks and giving first aid. Three Chinese casualties were standing by the wall of the operating room waiting for nurses and Friends to carry away the one who had been operated on so they could climb up on the vacant operating table and sigh thankfully as Bawk or Esther began to chloroform them. My body was covered with blood.”

A U.S. Army dentist joined the unit. He was no help on most wounds and did not know how to scrub up. “He washed his hands just like any dentist does be fore he sticks his thumb in your mouth.” But when Seagrave got a puzzling jaw case, the dentist stepped forward. “I let him go to it with a sigh of relief. By George, that fellow certainly knew his job! By the time he had finished I had something I could really drape that face over.” Captain Grindlay from Harvard and the Mayo Clinic appeared. At first he seemed disgruntled to be put under a missionary doctor with native nurses. But he proved an excellent, tireless surgeon and gradually lost his standoffishness.

There were more & more patients. The hospital moved back & back. The nurses learned to dive for slit trenches. The weather got hot. Food ran short and was often so poor that Grindlay could not digest it. It began to be time to abandon Burma altogether. Dr. Seagrave began to try to gather up all his people from the outpost hospitals and his old home at Namkham. He corralled nearly all of them. Most of the nurses elected to goalong with him to India.

The Trip Out. He personally got along all right until the trucks and jeeps had to be abandoned and the walking began. Then, besides his severe malaria, he developed four excruciating sores on his feet. On May 14 General Stilwell caught him resting in a blanket. “What’s the matter, Seagrave, got fever?” “No, sir, I got wet and felt a little cold so was warming up.” “How are your feet?” “Better, sir.” “You are lying.” “Yes, sir.”

Seagrave made it on rafts, ponies and at last a first-class compartment on an Indian .train where he slept on the floor “to ease my conscience.” At the end of the book Seagrave is in Assam, happily planning hospital facilities to take care of the refugees out of Burma: “So pitiful. . . . They are starved and emaciated and . . . have picked up the most virulent forms of malaria, amebic and bacillary dysentery.” The doctor and his own malaria (which he says he could cure if he had time to go to bed) are somewhere in India still.