Word: shigeto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Flash-Boom. For Shigeto, the job of treating Hiroshima's survivors began moments after pikadon (Japanese for "flash-boom"). For a moment he paused, listening to the screams of pain that filled the air, and asked himself, "God, how on earth could a single doctor handle this mountain of patients." Then, although stunned by the explosion, Shigeto knelt, opened his black bag and began to treat the man lying at his feet, only to yield to the victim's pleas that his wife be treated first. After administering first aid to the couple, Shigeto turned his attention...
...Shigeto worked his way toward the fringes of the holocaust in the center of the city. He lost count of the number of patients he treated that first day, but vividly remembers the feeling of frustration that overtook him as he emptied his bag of supplies, then began tearing up his shirt to bandage the injured. Says Shigeto: "I realized how terrible it is to be a doctor and to be unable to do anything at all to the hundreds of wounded and dying all around...
Late that night, Shigeto reached home to find his wife and two children safe. But his reunion was a brief one. Five of his 27 colleagues at the hospital had been killed in the blast; for the next two months Shigeto was so busy treating survivors that he could not return home to visit his family...
Deadly Radiation. Like most Hiroshimans, Shigeto wondered what kind of a weapon could have wrought such havoc on his city. But unlike most, he had an idea. On the second day after the explosion, he had some X-ray plates brought up from the hospital's storeroom, still in their lead case. When he found that all of them had been fogged, he remembered an article he had once read in a science magazine and concluded that his city had been hit by an atom bomb...
That knowledge was of little help in treating the bomb victims. Doctors at that time had only scanty knowledge about the effects of atomic radiation. But Shigeto and his colleagues soon became experts. Within weeks after the blast, patients began turning up at the hospital complaining tearfully that their hair had fallen out overnight. Their hair eventually grew back, but other problems remained. Doctors began to notice an increasing incidence of leukemia, a cancer of the blood-forming cells. Over the years, they have found among Hiroshimans a greater than normal occurrence of other cancers as well...