A YOUNG Salisbury woman told this week how she'd seen doctors deliver a baby by Caesarean section and then leave it to die.

It happened in Tamil Nadu, Southern India, earlier this year.

Nineteen-year-old Lucy Barratt had been helped by Salisbury Rotary Club to spend two months in the province getting work experience with two Indian GPs.

She sat in on consultations, and saw patients being treated for everything from Aids to leprosy.

But it was the incident with the baby that moved her most.

"It was terribly deformed," she explained to Salisbury Rotarians at their meeting at the Milford Hall Hotel.

"It probably wouldn't have lived for long anyway.

"But after it was delivered they simply put it on a tray and then just walked away.

"It died about two hours later. They have a different attitude to things out there."

There was also a different attitude to basic hygiene she'd seen the same hypodermic needle being used for successive blood-tests without being re-sterilised. But this was because there was a desperate shortage of syringes.

And there was queue-jumping. She recalled how one morning the local mayor came into the surgery: "He just barged into the consulting room and sat down. We were expected to usher out the patient who was already being treated, and that's exactly what we did."

Miss Barratt, who was educated at South Wilts Grammar School, Salisbury, and Dauntsey's, West Lavington, is due to read biology at Newcastle University next term.

Once there, she hopes eventually to switch to medicine. At present she is working as a temporary assistant at Salisbury District Hospital.

She thanked Rotarians for making this life-changing trip possible: "I saw things which I would never have seen otherwise. It was a far wider experience than you would ever get at home."