“Dirty work, whaling,” was the Doctor’s comment, as he examined the wound. “Everything is rotten meat and a wound easily becomes infected.”
Number four was a baffling case of multiple gangrene. This Bonne Bay fisherman had a nose and an ear that looked as if they had turned to black rubber. His toes were sloughing off. The back of his right hand was like raw beef. His left leg was bent at an angle of 90 degrees, and as it could not bear the pressure of the bedclothes a scaffolding had been built over it. The teeth were gone, and when the dressings were removed even the plucking of the small hairs on the leg gave the patient agony.
“What have you been eating?”
“Potatoes, sir.”
“What else?”
“Turnips, sir.”
“You need green food. Fresh vegetable salts.”
The Doctor looked out of the window and saw a dandelion in the rank green grass. “That’s what he ought to have,” was his comment.
On the verandah were four out-of-door patients to whom fresh air was essential. One had a tubercular spine. A roll of plaster had been coming by freight all summer long and was impatiently awaited. But a delay of months on the Labrador is nothing unusual. Dr. Daly, of Harvard, presented the Strathcona with a searchlight, and it was two years on the way—most of that time stored in a warehouse at North Sydney.
Around these fresh-air cases the verandah was netted with rabbit-wire. That was to keep the dogs from breaking in and possibly eating the patients, who are in mortal terror of the dogs.