On December 6, 1917 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a munitions ship (the Mont Blanc) collided with a vessel in the Narrows of the harbor, triggering a catastrophic fire and explosion that destroyed much of the city, killed over 1,600 people and injured over 9,000. Many of the injured had been staring out the window at the burning vessel when it exploded, resulting in horrifying facial injuries from broken glass. Dr. George Cox, a local eye surgeon, operated for more than three straight days. Here is an excerpt about his efforts:At Camp Hill, Cox was still standing over the operating table. He had been at the hospital for forty-five hours, operating straight for over thirty. He was rationing the chloroform for use on the worst cases. On Saturday afternoon alone he removed twenty-five eyes and threw them into a medical surgical bucket on the floor. By mid-afternoon it was full. The medical student in charge of gathering information, who had served beside Cox since his arrival, gently put down his tags, smiled at Cox, and fainted. Cox leaned over the table and saw the young student lying in a heap on the floor, looking like the patients he had worked on since Thursday night. It seemed like weeks had passed since then. He requested a replacement.When Jack MacKeen, a soldier, returned to the hospital Saturday morning after sleeping several hours at home, he was summoned to Cox’s side. He made his way to the “busy eye ward,” where he walked between the rows of patients with gauze over their eyes and linen tags pinned to their chests. He had heard the rumors about eyes being removed without anesthetic, which made him apprehensive. At the end of the ward, two soldiers picked up a man on a stretcher and carried him through the makeshift door. MacKeen followed them behind the screen, where he got his first look at Cox, who was standing over a patient on the table. His wavy hair, which he tried so hard to keep neatly combed and parted, had fallen into loose curls. His smooth broad face looked as haggard as soldiers returning from the front. Next to him on a chair was the man who had been carried in on the stretcher. Half of his face was chopped open. A nurse administered chloroform at the end of the table. One of the original five nurses, she also looked exhausted. Cox caught the teenager’s glance at the surgical bucket and asked him to empty it. When MacKeen returned with a clean bucket, Cox ordered him to take charge of the tags, gathering the name and address of the patient, “the type of operations, etc.,” and they continued this way until sometime after supper when the nurse put down the chloroform cone. Her eyes looked heavy, as if she were having trouble making sense of the scene before her. She could not go on. Cox looked over to MacKeen and told him to take over.
The nurse showed him how to place a metal-framed cone strung with ribbed-cotton gauze over the patient’s nose and mouth and then slowly drip the sweet-smelling chloroform onto the fabric until the patient slipped into unconsciousness. She monitored the patient’s pulse and his eyes carefully. Administering chloroform was no simple matter. Only trained doctors were supposed to administer it, and in America they were already switching to ether which was easier to control. The nurse left the teenage MacKeen and the soldiers lifted the man with a severely lacerated face onto the table. His nose hung upside down over his mouth and chin. Cox looked at him with curiosity. “Remarkable… the face had been cloven down slantwise from the bridge of the nose as if with a hatchet, going through the nasal cavities and antra, and the whole flap hanging forward.” He examined it from every angle, perplexed. What was left of the nose was swollen and inflated. The wound itself was clean. He picked up the flap and fit it perfectly onto the wound, but the man gasped for air. Cox pulled it back, fascinated. He had never seen anything like it, but he had an idea how to fix it. Cox fed a tube through each nostril into the cavity and sewed the whole nose back onto the face. It was the only thing that he could think would work. When he checked the patient several days later, he was pleased to find that it was healing. “As if nothing had happened.” The man could breathe.
Culled from: Curse of the Narrows
I highly recommend this book, by the way. It’s fascinating and ghastly from start to finish! |
