Silk Cycle

As many a Chinese soldier knows, the Japanese shells that tore his body were made from U.S. scrap iron. Last week the circle was complete: silk that had gone from Japan to the U.S. was going to China, to be used as bandages. The silk, too, was a kind of scrap: old silk stockings.

For ten years Dermatologist Thomas W. Ross of Portland, Ore. has used silk stockings as emergency bandages to hold dressings in place. They were cool, comfortable, easy to apply and clean. A month ago he suggested that the women of the U.S. save their silk stockings for first-aid work instead of throwing them away when they got runs.

A war-economy-minded journalist, John Patric, had an even better idea. He had lived in China, knew that Chinese doctors were so short of gauze that they were using paper as a substitute. He visited a nearby plant, persuaded its officials that soft bundles of stockings would make good packing for planes, would serve a useful purpose at the other end of the line.*

Laying their heads together, Dr. Ross, Patric and Dr. Ting D. Lee, local head of the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, drafted a circular to be packed with every 25 pairs of stockings. Written in Chinese and illustrated with drawings and photographs (see cut), it showed how to apply silk-stocking bandages.

Last week, when Portland women got runs, they did not toss their laddered stockings into the wastebasket. Instead they sent them to the Salvation Army, where they were fumigated, packed. Then they were stuffed into the crates of fighting planes, en route to China.

*The stockings will substitute only for outer bandages, not for sterile dressings.

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