Description
Ms. Orford discusses the conversion of an alms house into #9 Hospital in Horsham, England. She describes the situation there as very busy, and well managed despite a lack of equipment.
Elizabeth Orford
Elizabeth Orford was born on April 14, 1923 in Toronto, Ontario. She chose physiotherapy as a career and graduated from the University of Toronto in June, 1943. Ms. Orford interned at the Children's Memorial Hospital, dealing with victims of polio. When asked to join the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, she accepted, enlisting in Montreal. Ms. Orford first served in Canadian military hospitals, dealing with infantry and flight training injuries. She went overseas, and worked in #9 Canadian hospital, Horsham, then moved to #24 Canadian hospital, Horley. There, Ms. Orford treated many amputees and burn victims. After returning home, she worked at the Christie Street Veterans Hospital in Toronto.
Transcript
One of the doctors, Roma Marrott, a very nice person, she and I were posted to No. 9 Canadian General Hospital in a place called Horsham in Sussex. No. 9 Canadian General, the buildings were what had been an old alms house, I suppose you would call it an alms house and so there was a variety of old buildings that probably had been built in the 1800’s but there was a chapel and there were these small different buildings where poor people had been living but they fixed it up very nicely for No. 9 and of course there was my first taste of seeing war casualties. I must admit that it was, it took me a while to realize the extent of what I was seeing. We were very busy as you could imagine, almost everybody needed physio and it was a small department, really quite inadequate but well-equipped but inadequate. So we did a lot of our cases on the wards as much as we possibly could unless they needed special equipment so we couldn’t have more than three or four patients at a time in our department.