Medicine: Eve’s Hair

One day recently four men with head wounds were brought to a British Army hospital in France; they could not be operated on for lack of needles & thread fine enough to stitch severed nerves together. Lieut. William Such, who used to repair miniature watches for a living, soon contrived the needles, but a thread substitute was something else again. The hair of all the nurses except one was found too fine—and that one was a blonde (black hair, easy to see, had to be used in so delicate an operation).

“It looked as if we were up against it,” wrote Lieut. Such to his wife Eve in Beckenham, Kent, “when I suddenly remembered your lock of hair in my pocket. Yours was four-thousandths of an inch thick and dead-black. So four strands were fixed on four of my fine needles—it took me hours—and the surgeon, who is a marvelous chap, let me watch your hair sewing up chaps’ nerves in the head. Today there are four men walking around with your hair in their heads.”