In a Turkish Hospital

TS-BROWN.

By F. YEA Stamboul, is shortly to be published) will appear in the Special,* next prison in Constantinople.] [A further article by Major If: Yoats-ItroWn (ivhoso book, A Lancer in

week. It describes his escape from a

WALKING down Wimpole Street the other day from an expensive nursing home where I had been visiting a friend, my memory turned back to a time when I had been at the gate of death and Turkish doctors had boldly pulled me through—the right way.

I had fallen ill with great suddenness in the spring of 1916, after a desert march from Mosul as a prisoner of War. I was sitting one morning at the window of the house in Aleppo in which we were confined, feeling per- fectly well, smoking, enjoying the sunshine, and lousing my trousers, in whose seams an active and industrious family had hoped to remain for the duration of the War, when I began to shiver. In half an hour I was in a high fever, and the right side of my face was paralysed. That night I was taken to a hospital, where I was met by two odd little doctors, who stood well away from me (for fear of typhus) while they examined my chest and back. Satisfied that I was not infectious, they gave me some nasty stuff to drink. Soon I became unconscious. * * * * *

Where was I ? I asked myself when I came to. I had been sick and could not move. No one came, and I felt in- clined to be sick again ; so I forced myself to roll to the edge of the-bed. Was I alone ? Even that I could not discover; for although I knew it was day I could not see beyond the floor. I could smell a little and hear a little : was I on board ship, listening to eight bells ringing, or dead ? Not dead, surely ; for I was conscious of my unpleasant condition, and ashamed of it. I hoped no one would come to make a fuss. No one did. I dropped off to sleep.

How:long I lay, I ,do not know; but when I awoke, with an instant need to get up, I found that I eouldsee, and could crawl out of bed on my hands and knees. I was in a large, low room with two other beds in it, occupied by inert figures, and I was dressed in a cotton nightshirt. At the foot of my bed was a green-and-white quilt, which seemed. familiar (it, had been my companion for three months) though I could not at first link it up with my life. But.by the time I had reached a hole in the floor at the efai of the ,pa.ssage I remembered this was Aleppo, the stronghold of civilization to which my hopes had so often turned in the desert.

When I had scrambled back to my room, I wrapped myself in my quilt and waited. Something would happen soon : my fellow-patients would wake up ; a nurse would take our temperatures ; the doctors would arrive ; I would send a message to the American Consul. I began to wish that I possessed nail scissors, a looking-glass, a Comb. Perhaps these articles were somewhere about, but it was difficult to turn my head : my hands and legs and eyes still objected to obeying orders, but I had begun,to feel-better inside.

At last the little doctors arrived, with three ragged male attendants. No one paid any attention to what I tried to say : an orderly brought a waterproof mat and ripped the sheets off my bed ; another picked me up in

my quilt and laid me back on it, throwing a couple of blankets on the top as an afterthought. Meanwhile the doctors had walked away. •

I raised myself up to protest, then sank back and cried from sheer weakness. At midday I was given a bowl of gruel, and in the evening the two doctors looked in again and prescribed another purgative. In spite of their rough and ready manner I began to feel confidence in their method. They never looked at a tongue or at a thermometer : all that seemed to interest them was the state of the patient's skin, and their chief remedy ap- peared to be Epsom Salts in such quantities that it acted at once as an emetic and purgative.

At their bidding I drank a quart of tepid saline mixture, sipping the draught slowly. Ms, stomach revolted, but I told myself it was Imperial Tokay, which amused me and gave me a sense of power over the miserable enveffipe of skin that had plagued me by presuming. o be ill. What was the body, I asked myself emptily ?

Presently, however; my templeS began to throb and my thumbs seemed to swell to a colossal size. I was no Ramakrishna, able to say, "Neti; neti, not this, not this," to the delusions of the senses, and I struggled out of bed, delirious.

The next thing I remember is that 1 found myself lying in a patch of moonlight in the passage, too weak to go back or forward ; so I cooled my head against a jar that someone had left for ablutionary purposes, and wondered what would happen next. Then I began to think of seas and rivers. All the delightful things I had ever done in water kept flitting through my mind. I remembered crouching in the bow of my father's cat-boat as we beat up a reach to Salem, with the spray in our faces ; and I thought of the sparkling sapphire of the Mediterranean and the cool translucencies of Cuckoo Weir. No one came to disturb my meditations. The moonlight shifted across my body, and slowly, slowly, the wells of consciousness began to fill up. I was, quite definitely, getting well. It was as if I had really travelled to America and to Italy and to the Thames, living again upon their waters, and as if their solace had washed me clean. Now I was coming back 'to my body in Aleppo.

Two days later—saved by a dose of salts or mere imagination—I had rejoined my companions in the city and was ready to start with them on a long journey to the interior of Turkey. If my disease had been diagnosed and I had been scientifically treated for it, I dare say I should have been ill for several weeks.

* * * * * * * Is it possible, I asked myself as I crossed Cavendish Square, that patients are too well looked after in this country, and sometimes killed by kindness ? The taking of temperatures, night washings, frequent feeding may be worth twenty guineas a week ; but the. natural- instinct of the sick is to lie quite still, with no nurse but via medicatria naturcte.