With Forceps and Pitchfork

What does a country doctor do when, on his rounds, he encounters a Nazi parachutist? In the British Lancet which reached the U.S. last week, an anonymous doctor told what he had done. He had just left a farmhouse after delivering a baby. As he stuck his forceps in his hip pocket, he saw an airplane "crashing to earth and the ... pilot . . . floating gracefully from the sky." The doctor dashed back to the farm, snatched up a pitchfork, went after the parachutist, whom he found in the garden, still tangled in his harness.

"Who are you?" asked the doctor uncertainly, brandishing the pitchfork.

"I'm a German airman and a gentleman," answered the Nazi.

At this moment the wind blew the cords of the parachute around the doctor's legs and he fell in a heap on the grass, bruising himself on his forceps. When the Nazi saw the forceps, he said: "How far am I from the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow? I am tired of the Nazis. [I want] to be a doctor. Already I have my first examination passed. I know the Pharmacopeia Britannica [guide to British drugs]."

Ruefully rubbing his backside, the shaken doctor put some highly technical questions to the parachutist, to his amazement received accurate answers. At that point the informal medical examination was interrupted by the arrival of Home Guards, who congratulated the doctor on his capture, bore the invader off. The doctor never saw him again.

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