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Show Lives Saved by Untrained Mm ; Amateurs Praised by Army I And Navy for Surgery on ; Many Battle Fronts. WASHINGTON. Some army and ' navy people have been practicing , surgery without a license but none ' of them has been court-martialed. In fact, most of them have rated medals, as related by the Chicago ; Tribune, You might call them the "clutch surgeons" of this war because, ; while they hold no doctors' degrees, i they've stepped in to do a surgeon's job when the chips were down and : no skilled medical aid was at hand. Most of them are navy "hospital corpsmen" or army "medical aid men." They've had limited training . in tending the sick and wounded, but the emergencies which many of them have met demand skill far beyond the instructions they have received. On land, in the air, and aboard ships and submarines they have filled in the gaps in their medical knowledge with Yankee improvisation, improvisa-tion, and plain, everyday guts. Grim Amputations. Sgt. Frank Palco of Roth, Va., had been a medical aid man only a Week-when -seirt to a bombed air raid shelter in Malmedy, Belgium, where he found three women pinned by the legs beneath the wreckage. Working in dim light and using only some morphine, sulfanilamide, and a pair of surgical scissors, Palco amputated one of the .first woman's legs, and cut both legs off the others. The first two victims lived. A wounded man lay in a heavily mined field somewhere in Europe. His left leg was nearly severed below be-low the knee. To his side crawled Cpl. Andrew A. .Aragon of Per-alta, Per-alta, N. M. Aragon jabbed the man with a ' merciful shot of morphine, tried to sever the dangling leg with his bandage band-age scissors, then finished the amputation am-putation with a knife. During the African invasion, navy-man navy-man James V. Minichino, 28, of Brooklyn. N. Y., had his leg torn off below the knee while attempting attempt-ing to pull a grounded boat off a reef. Minichino might have bled to death if an officer in his boat hadn't ripped off his own necktie, applied it as a tourniquet to Minichino' s leg. On a muddy field near Metz, an infantry man was struck in the throat by shrapnel. He was thrashing thrash-ing around frantically when Medical Aid Man Duanne H. Kinman of College Col-lege Place, Wis., reached him. The Breath of Life. While an army officer held the wounded man (there was no anesthetic anes-thetic available), Kinman made a small incision in the windpipe and slipped the top piece of a fountain pen into the incision to keep it open. He told his patient: "You can breathe through the cut I made even if you can't through your mouth or nose." The man recovered. re-covered. Second Lt. Mary Louise Hawkins of Redwood City, Calif., an army flight nurse, was in charge of 24 stretcher patients being flown from the Palau Islands to Guadalcanal when the hospital ship crash landed in a small clearing. One of the patients suffered a severe throat cut. Blood began to choke him. Nurse Hawkins quickly devised a ' suction pump from a syringe, some rubber hose, and the inflating tube from a "Mae West" life vest. For ' 19 hours, until rescuers from a destroyer de-stroyer came, she kept the man's throat free of blood. On the submerged submarine Sea-dragon, Sea-dragon, not far from Tokyo, Pharmacist's Phar-macist's Mate Wheeler B. Lipes of Roanoke, Va., did the honors when a seaman's appendix kicked up. Swinging battle lanterns and flashlights flash-lights lit a makeshift operating table ta-ble as Lipes timed his incision to the plunging of the craft. Bent tablespoons became surgical retractors, an inverted kitchen sieve, the ether cone, and alcohol from the torpedo mechanism sterilized steril-ized the instruments. The patient came through okay. |