Jungle Hospital

First open-air base hospital in U.S. history since the Civil War is the 2,900-bed unit established last month at Bataan by Colonel Carlton Lakey Vanderboget of Fort Missoula, Mont, and run by Colonel James W. Duckworth of Martinsville. Ind. The story is told in LIFE this week by TIME Correspondent Melville Jacoby--how workmen bulldozed a road through miles of jungle while bombers attacked them, how engineers set up light plants, built water chlorinators, even changed the course of a river which ran through one hospital site. Highlights:

In the open-air wards of Bataan Hospital lie U.S. and Filipino soldiers, women, children, Japanese prisoners. Nurses sleep under trees, near fox holes, wash their own overalls, bathe in streams. Food is cooked on two old-fashioned wood stoves. All equipment is sterilized, but the thick Bataan dust is everywhere, and assistants must constantly flap fly swatters.

Trucks bring the wounded from the front in a few hours and fill up operating tables in large tents. Often bombs fall so close to his operating table that Surgeon Lieut. Colonel Jack Schwartz must hesitate an instant until it is steady again. Major operations are usually performed under local anesthetic. But so far there have been enough sulfa drugs for all patients.

The doctors probe wounds for bullets and shell fragments, pay the Red Cross $5 every time they cannot find any. They also bet on the type of fragments they will dig out of wounds. Among their findings (all made in the U.S.): parts of Ford automobiles; nuts & bolts. Out of one soldier's body came a Singer sewing machine screwdriver. One night when the doctors and nurses had amputations on every table, they donated their own blood.

A new treatment to avoid gas gangrene has been developed by Lieut. Colonel Frank Scozzari Adamo. He cleans wounds with hydrogen peroxide, which liberates oxygen, kills gas-forming bacteria, unable to live in air. Then he opens the wounds wide, slitting the muscles longitudinally and exposing a large area to the air, so that the gas germs cannot breed. The slit muscles heal easily. By this "conservative surgery" Surgeon Adamo claims to have saved a large number of arms and legs.

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