CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG
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lera, and dysentery using Japanese material was completed in the same months.
In mid December the first move was made to restrict the area round the hospital in which we were allowed to move and the wire was brought closer in to exclude us from the peacetime N.A.A.F.I. block, the senior warrant officers' quarters and the tennis court. Christmas passed quietly, marked by the issue of extra food which had been prudently accumulated over a long time. The wards were decorated and carols were sung on Christmas Eve. We returned to reality with a night search by Seino in which he confiscated all electric heaters he found.
I JANUARY 1944 23 MARCH 1945
The British Military Hospital remained in Bowen Road till 23 March 1945 when it moved to the Central British School in Kowloon. It will be convenient therefore to cover the whole of 1944 and the first three months of 1945 in this section, and to leave the remainder of 1945 up to our release in August to be considered in a later section. Conditions in Bowen Road and in Kowloon were quite different.
On 1 January 1944 we had 234 patients, but by 31 December the number of patients had dropped to 145 and the staff had fallen to 55. During 1944 deaths numbered 14, and between January 1945 and our move to Kowloon in March a further two patients died. For the last ten days of January 1944 we had no patients on our dangerously ill list for the first time since our capture. This happy position did not last.
The decline in the number of patients was the result of two factors. Firstly, prisoners of war who had survived thus far had constitutions which had become better adjusted to the type of diet which was alone available to them while no further outbreaks of infections disease occurred. The general condition of our patients and staff upon whom our observations were made drifted slowly down, and in 1944 and early 1945 more of our staff were admitted for hospital treatment than at any other period during our imprisonment. The second cause was a Japanese order to me by Saito on 19 November 1944 to reduce our total of patients and staff to 200, and during that month two drafts totalling 9 staff and 96 patients left for camp. The timing of this decision should be seen against our predicament in Bowen Road resulting from growing shortages