CO129-571-10 Sino-Japanese War- Medical Relief Commission of the National Red Cross Society of China 12-9-1938 - 7-10-1938 — Page 16

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appointing the better qualified nurses to posts usually

occupied by junior medical officers. The fact that the

severely wounded largely fail to come down to the rear

means, however, that most of the hospitals in the rear are

filled with light or moderate cases. Nevertheless, inadequate

and unsound treatment gives rise to chronic sepsis,

especially ostemyelitis, contractures and unnecessary

deformation and to undue prolongation in the period of

recovery.

Poverty and furnishings, equipment and supplies and

meagreness of operating funds on the one hand, and the

incompetency of the hospital rank and file recruited mostly

from uneducated levels of the people on the other hand, often

combine to make of the hospitals wretched shelters, as

unsanitary, unclean and comfortless as the houses to which

the majority of the staff are accustomed.

These defects are realized by the Army Medical

Administration, but no great change can be effected until a

sufficient number of trained personnel are available to

carry out the desired reformation. The Army Medical Administra-

tion runs an Army Medical College for the technical education

of medical officers, but the College does not undertake the

training of under officers and men. However, a beginning of medical training of all ranks, in certain field centres, has now been instituted, and advantage is being taken of the Weishengshu Emergency Medical Service Training School for

the same purpose. The only drawback the limited facilities

of the Training School.

While such training will improve the quality of the personnel especially that of the lower ranks, and can provide on expansion new cadres in adequate numbers, it will not

remedy the shortage of officers (doctors) who cannot be

educated in less than five or six years. To secure additional

qualified