Cock a Hoop
Morris Hirsch had enjoyed the splendor of wave after wave of mountain ranges they traveled up, down and through from Adi Arcia to Decamere and on southwards to Amba Alagi and Alamata, to Dessie and through the Mussolini Tunnel on their 750 mile journey to Addis Ababa.
But on arrival at Addis Ababa Morris found the people were dirty and shabby like the people in the villages.
However, Emperor Haile Selassie was now once again living in his resplendent palace, which Morris was not privileged to enter.
Morris was, however, visited by a high personage from the palace, attended by a large entourage, all in their biblical style robes. His usual arrangement having been interrupted, he sought the army's assistance to receive his weekly syphilis injection. After Morris obliged, he expressed his wish to have his subsequent injections there. Morris declined the honor because of the uncertainty of his stay. Leaving the camp, with followers trailing behind him, a dense train of flies buzzed in their wake. Morris thought poverty, dirt, infections, infestations and venereal disease wove a pattern.
Morris was disappointed to be separated from the Three Musketeers again. He was aggravated further by his posting to a transport transit camp for the Kings African Rifles. Wholesale cohabitation with the locals had caused a venereal epidemic, a simultaneous triple infection of syphilis, gonorrhoea and soft sore, designated the 'full house'!
In most cases, the victims being uncircumcised, their severe balanitis and phimosis precluded retracting the foreskin to make an accurate diagnosis. Genuinely disabled, they posed a serious problem to the transport demands. Morris hit upon the unusual solution of circumcision at the outset, in spite of the gross purulent infection, believing that the exposure would not only facilitate diagnosis but establish drainage, improve hygiene, reduce disability and speed healing.
And so it proved. His team set up a stretcher assembly line. The patient was cleaned, moved up to be anesthetized, forwarded to a one stage foreskin excision and on to minimal stitching, incorporating the basic dressing. The whole procedure took more or less ten minutes, including short breaks to clean up and reset. The patients healed well in a few days and were back on duty within the week. The officers were pleased; patients grateful and the operating team cock-a-hoop.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References: Morris I. Hirsch unpublished memoirs. Hirsch Archives.
Photos:
Hirsch Archives
Also:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Guenete_Leul_Palace