THE MOST FREQUENT CAUSE OF DEATH FOLLOWING SEVERE BURNS.
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND. CIRCA MID-1950S.
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR CHRISTOPHER YARROW LAY DEEPLY anaesthetised as Professor Gordon Archer, senior consultant at the Burns Unit at the City General Hospital in Sheffield, continued to examine the burn damage to Yarrow’s face, head, and hands, particularly his left hand which had been the most extensively burned.
Yarrow had been doused in petrol and set alight by Sheila Anderson, a disturbed young woman with whom he had been talking on the roof of an asylum. “You killed my father,” she had said. “Frankie Starling, my dad, you had him hanged!”
His face, hands, and neck in flames, Yarrow had then fallen from the roof, injuring his shoulder, right knee, and lower back in the fall.
Sheila Anderson had then immolated herself, dying in the ambulance on the way to the same hospital. Tracked down and arrested by Yarrow, Frankie Starling had indeed died on the gallows, convicted of the murder of a wages clerk during a failed robbery.
Yarrow was hooked up to an IV with dextran, providing fluid resuscitation, minimising the effects of shock and had been given penicillin to prevent toxic shock syndrome caused by sepsis and infection, the most frequent cause of death following severe burns.
Archer was assessing the various degrees of burns, classifying them in his mind as either first degree: Erythema, which was heat, pain, and small blisters; second degree: skin inflammation with epidermal detachment; third degree: partial destruction of the papillary layer and subpapillary network of the corium; fourth degree: destruction of the skin down to the subcuticular level; and fifth degree: damage to all soft tissues down to the bone and crust formation over skin and muscle. He was also examining the depth as well as the degree of burn and quantifying the burn surface area.
It had been fortunate that Professor Archer was available that day. One of the leading experts in the treatment of burns, during the war he had worked alongside the famed Sir Archibald McIndoe at the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead. McIndoe was a pioneer of reconstructive plastic surgery, including facial reconstruction, treating and rehabilitating British and Allied aircrew severely burnt during the war and founding the Guinea Pig Club, an exclusive club for those airmen severely burnt in combat.
Archer consulted for two days a week at the hospital, and it had been fortuitous that the day Yarrow was brought in was one of those days.
Upon learning that his patient was a former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, he decided to cancel his other engagements and concentrate his skills on treating the severe fourth and fifth degree burns to Yarrow’s face and hands.
During Yarrow’s lengthy recovery period, Archer recommended Yarrow to the Guinea Pig Club President, and because of his wartime service and public duty as a policeman in which he was severely burnt, he was made an Honorary Member. An honour he would treasure for the remainder of his life.
A less savoury distinction, coined on the streets, was the nickname, the sobriquet, of ‘Crispy Bacon.’ It did not bother him in the slightest.