In Stockholm

Cables, telegrams, letters, telephone tinkles and callers poured into the home of Dr. Samuel Hybbinette of Stockholm last week. It was the Doctor's 50th birthday. The thousands congratulating him were chiefly medical colleagues and onetime patients, whose fondness and admiration were not occasioned by Dr. Hybbinette's superlative surgical skill and his magnetic personality alone. Nor had he performed some new miracle with his keen scalpel. But one and all praised him for a habit that he has, a talented habit uncommon among surgeons. Dr. Hybbinette has a rich tenor voice. He has won many a prize by exercising it competitively, and it is his habit to enter the wards with music in his throat Bending over to change a dressing he will flood his patient with, perhaps, the rhapsodic Prize Song from Die Meistersingers. Even whetting his scalpel, even plying it amid quivering tendons and tissue, he will chant a soft aria from The Barber of Seville. Aside from the pleasure it gives his effervescent nature, Dr. Hybbinette believes-- and last week's flood of felicitations seemed to bear him out--that his hospital singing cheers patients to recovery, banishes their fear of his knife.