My adventures as a ship's surgeon on passenger-carrying freighters plying the seas between Australia and Europe and later across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and on to the USA, have come up in recent conversations. At the risk of boring family members who've heard these before, I'll paste two stories here. These happened on a wonderful voyage in 1954, on the Adelaide Star, a Blue Star line freighter that carried 12 passengers and a crew made up mainly of junior ship's officers about my own age with whom I bonded better than I did with any of the passengers; after all, as the ship's surgeon, I was a member of the crew too.
This anecdote was published as a column-filler in British Medical Journal in 1993
Pushing teeth
In the 1940s when I was a medical student, I had a card with a long list of procedures to perform under supervision and get signed up by clinical tutors: reducing and plastering a Colles' fracture, performing a lumbar puncture, passing a catheter, and so on. At the end of the list was "extract two teeth." Why two? I never discovered the answer. But like some of my classmates, I extracted a great many more. The dentist who supervised us had a sensationally beautiful chairside assistant, and we went back again and again to gaze at her longingly and attempt to invite her to our parties (to no avail; she disdained sex-starved medical students suffering from arrested adolescence). But thanks to her, I soon excelled at extracting teeth. The dentist knew well why I was there, and ensured that my time wasn't entirely wasted.
The secret of dental extractions is not to pull the tooth, but to push it out: push the wedge shaped points of the dental forceps well down alongside the roots of the tooth so the wedge loosens the roots; extraction then is usually easy.
This skill came in handy a few years later. I was hitching a ride across the world as ship's doctor on a Blue Star freighter. Shortly after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route from London to Adelaide, the chief engineer, a curmudgeonly tyrant, bit savagely into a bread roll and broke the cusp off a bicuspid. He was in agony. I had to deal expeditiously and well with this acute dental emergency or my life in this small, closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living. The surgery on this ship was very well equipped; I could have done a craniotomy or a destructive operation on a foetus. And of course there was a full set of dental forceps.
First I premedicated the Chief with a tumbler of brandy. The hard part was injecting local anaesthetic; even semi-stupefied, the Chief didn't like this part at all. The heavy seas of the Roaring Forties were no help, nor was my choice of a dental chair without adequate support for his head and neck (I hadn't planned this part as thoughtfully as I ought to have done).
The rest was easy. I carefully positioned the dental forceps blades beside the broken tooth, and pushed down as hard as I could. The tooth popped up and out like a pea out of a pod. It was so simple I felt like clearing the rest of that side of his mouth while it was numb, but self-restraint prevailed. For the rest of the voyage across the Southern Ocean perhaps it's as well that my reputation for competence wasn't tested further. I've never again been called upon to extract teeth. Pity, really. I think I could have become a master of the art, thanks to those hours of unrequited lust and useful experience in the dental clinic behind our teaching hospital.
Fortunately the other memorable episode happened a few days after I took out the chief engineer’s tooth. I submitted this to Richardson’s Roundup on CBC Radio but if Bill Richardson ever played it, I didn’t hear it.
Catching an albatross
Few of life’s pleasures can beat a long ocean voyage. In 1954 I hitched a ride as ship’s surgeon on a freighter, a cheap way for young doctors to travel between England and Australia in those days. The voyage lasted nearly two months, including four weeks without a port – from a refuelling stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands to Adelaide. We sailed past Cape Town without stopping, on a sparkling sunny day, so close we could see the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. It was nearing dusk as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and several albatross took station as escorts above our stern. For two weeks, until landfall off Kangaroo Island in South Australia, these great, graceful creatures glided effortlessly in our slipstream. It was the best journey in the world. It was a good time to read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic, The Worst Journey in the World.
Cherry-Garrard described how, before reaching Antarctica, he caught sea-birds, including an albatross, by trailing a weighted line in the wake of the ship (this was for scientific observations he was making). The weight bobs up and down on the surface, sustained there by the momentum of the fast-moving ship. To an albatross, it looks like a fish, a tasty morsel worth swooping to swallow; but because the albatross comes in from ahead and to one side, the weight causes the line to tangle about the bird's wings or feet, so it can be hauled aboard. Apsley Cherry-Garrard didn't say what happened after that.
It works. At the first cast, the largest of our escorts swooped down, and just as Cherry-Garrard described, the weighted line wrapped itself around the bird's legs, and we hauled it aboard, its wings flapping ineffectually.
An airborne albatross is one of the noblest sights one could ever wish to see. On the pitching and rolling deck of our ship on a blustery sea in the Roaring Forties, it was disconsolate, deeply embarrassed, very frightened, very angry – and very incontinent. At both ends. I can't recall all these years later which came first, the vomited-up half-digested fish, or the voided bowels; or whether both happened together. It covered most of the well-scrubbed deck with a stinking mess that had the consistency of fish glue and smelled unimaginably abominable.
There was another problem. Mindful of the Ancient Mariner's fate, we wanted to release our albatross, but it couldn't or wouldn't take off from the deck. It was unfortunate that the ship's captain, a descendent of Bligh of the Bounty I shouldn’t wonder, chose to make his daily inspection of the decks while we were wondering what to do. Observing him, I tried to be a detached clinician: Was I about to see a man actually having an apoplectic stroke? Gritting his teeth, he ordered us to get rid of the bird and clean up the mess. His demeanour made it clear that failure to comply, and quickly, would have dire consequences.
In the end one of the other officers launched the bird by running along the deck with it, like getting a kite aloft. Not before he'd slipped and slid on his bottom in the guano, however. We three miscreants who had started all this didn't escape so easily. We were on our hands and knees until after dusk, cleaning and scrubbing the deck to restore it to its pristine pre-albatross condition. Next day the pants I'd been wearing went over the side, stinking past all hope of ever being cleansed of the mess that covered them. Good pants too, my second-best pair.
In those days, the standard British Board of Trade rate of pay for ship’s surgeons who got a free passage across the world in this way was a shilling a month, plus keep. I should have received two shillings. When I collected my discharge certificate in Sydney at the end of what was, all things considered, a voyage that I still regard as one of the highlights of my life, I got only one shilling. I didn’t dare ask why.
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