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medicines and equipment. Doctors like Commander Wilde have to rely on herbs and plant extracts to treat ailments. There are tremendously valuable reference books, which enable doctors of the present to be far more effective than the practitioners from the nineteenth century, but there are limitations to what they can achieve these days.
Plastic syringes no longer exist. Innovative technology has led to efficient analgesics which can be administered orally. Plaster casts are back in vogue for broken bones, and dentists do extractions a lot more than they used to. Mind you, people take better care of their teeth nowadays. The idea of using wooden false teeth again has never really caught on.
Part of AuntSylvie’s job is to oversee the medical wing of the Coliseum. She and NurseCathy were fascinated by Commander Wilde’s scientific knowledge and skill. So a sophisticated library has been maintained for the staff within the Coliseum.
AuntSylvie later explains to Walker that Mrs Wilde died of meningitis. While antibiotics like penicillin can be highly effective against many infections, benzylpenicillin sodium is needed to fight meningitis. In the first place, it’s hard to engineer a chemical like that in the local pharmacy. And without intravenous tools, it’s hard to administer it effectively. Even if you can get it circulating in the body it has a fifty fifty chance of finding its way into the cerebrospinal fluid and fighting the infection.
“Thank you for the bio-chemistry lesson,” says Walker!
“Ooh, look at the time,” says Hayley, “I have to dash, it’s time for karate.”
—o—
“Spoons, mate! I’ll get you some! What sort of spoons do you want?”
MaxChaos hasn’t heard the term before, although people like HayWire know exactly what it means. They were both oddballs in their school days, though in very different ways.
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