This is no pipe dream or a simple newspaper yarn, but the plain truth. Some of the medicos from the United States have given up earnings of such big figures they should only be mentioned kneeling. Where they gathered in half a million at home yearly, they are accepting a major's [three thousand and service allowance, in order to see that] Bill Jones from Kankakee or Sam Smith from Pleasantville has the proper treatment for warts in his stomach or barnacles on his thinking apparatus.
Ward in an A.E.F. Hospital, Showing Some of the First to Pay a Visit to "Blighty."
In addition to separating themselves from large wads of coin and all the comforts of home, they have brought over the staffs of their various hospitals, who know all their funny ways of operating, from how best to cut a man loose from his appendix to painless extraction of the bankroll. They have also brought along all their collections of patent knives and scissors, the only thing they left behind being the doctors' bills that would take a year's service as a doughboy to meet the first instalment.
A Fear to Forget.
Nearly everyone has an ingrowing objection to going to a hospital, or acknowledging he must take the count for an illness, because of fear as to what treatment he may draw.
Forget it!
The Amexforce hospitals are not built along those lines, nor are the nurses sweet young things of fifty odd summers who hand out tracts with the morning's milk or make kittenish love to a lad who may be tied down to a bed or too weak to run away. And the doctors are not owlish-looking creatures with whiskers that would make a goat die of envy and sick-room manners that would scare a Mental Scientist into catalepsy. They are real human beings who understand the troubles of mankind from nostalgia (professional name for homesickness) down to enlargement of the coco (unprofessional name for the swelled head) and are doing everything in their power to make a little easier the big game we are playing to a showdown with the Kaiser.
It's human nature to hate to go to the doctor. But if the boys would only realize that if they would take their smaller troubles to the "docs" they could easily prevent them from becoming more serious ones, it would save a lot of useless suffering. Of course, that doesn't apply to treatment for the wounded, but the Army Chief Surgeon is trying his darndest to make that as perfect as possible.