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There was a scarcity of dressings, of instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was nothing but hacking and sewing. "I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and then handling living tissue.
His master's gray eyes again fastened on the screen. Fiercely, for a moment, he smoothed his bangs. The laboratory flashed into clear outline again. There was the shaft of white light; the operating table, full under it; the anesthetic cylinder, the banks of instruments, the sterilizers with their wisps of steam curling ceaselessly up.
Wilson was getting results. Even the most jealous of that most jealous of professions, surgery, had to admit that he got results. Operations were over for the afternoon. The last case had been wheeled out of the elevator. The pit of the operating-room was in disorder towels everywhere, tables of instruments, steaming sterilizers. Orderlies were going about, carrying out linens, emptying pans.
Sterilizers were convenient to one side, a thin wraith of steam drifting up from them into the source of the light. Four men worked within the brilliant shaft of illumination four white-clad figures, hands gloved and faces swathed in surgeons' masks. Only their lifeless eyes were visible, concentrated on their tasks of preparation.
Two communicated with storerooms, one opened into the passage that led to the aft observation pit, the fourth gave access to the sick-bay. This door the Master slid back. Followed by the major he passed through. A small but fully equipped hospital met their eyes. Cots, operating-table, instrument-cases, sterilizers, everything was complete. Immaculate cleanliness reigned.
I took charge of the theatre as I knew where the things went, and I think the British working man would have been rather astonished to see how fast the big sterilizers fell apart and the operating-tables slid into their cases.
Atkinson is unpacking and setting up his sterilizers and incubators. Wright is wrestling with the electrical instruments. Evans is busy surveying the Cape and its vicinity. Oates is reorganising the stable, making bigger stalls, &c. Cherry-Garrard is building a stone house for taxidermy and with a view to getting hints for making a shelter at Cape Crozier during the winter.
In the center of the square room five improvised operating tables were drawn up, each one flooded individually with, light from focused flood-tubes above in the white ceiling. Flanking them were tables for instruments and sterilizers, and, more prominent, two small sleek cylindrical drums, from one of which sprouted a tube ending in a breathing-cone.
Ponies for exercise were allotted to Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Hooper, Clissold, P.O. Evans and Crean, besides Oates and Anton, but in making this allotment Scott was obliged to add a warning that those who exercised the ponies would not necessarily lead them in the spring. Wilson at once began busily to paint, and Atkinson was equally busy unpacking and setting up his sterilizers and incubators.
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