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POW camp
In an oral history he provided years later, Bard describes his role providing care in the POW camp as requiring many non-medical skills: figuring out when patients really needed to be excused from labor, and when he should not risk his credibility by saying they were too sick to work; dealing with the camp’s black marketeers to get eggs or other healthy food for the people who most needed it; and doing what he could to keep up morale. (He mentions that some of the black marketers were really very helpful, and even got him some necessary supplies for free – usually by trading cigarettes. He also mentions the morale problems caused in the early months by depression among soldiers who had believed the rumors that Nationalist Chinese soldiers were on their way to liberate Hong Kong, and became demoralized when they realized that they had been lied to about this.) Other aspects of the work were medical, but not covered by any of his training: if he did not have enough of a needed medicine, should he give everyone who needed it a weak dose, or the patients who needed it most a full dose? Some of it also involved treating diseases Bard was not used to seeing, but which appeared in camp because of malnutrition and/or people who had missed vaccinations.
