Medicine has come a long way since the days of the Dec. 7, 1941, attacks on Oahu.

Dr. H. Lorrin Lau remembers being a 9-year-old and needing medical attention for a deeply implanted kiawe thorn in his heel several days after the Pearl Harbor air raid.

Lau’s father, an Army lieutenant, took the boy to Saint Louis College, which had been repurposed into one of several auxiliary hospitals.

"I heard them saying, ‘We don’t have any more anesthesia,’" said Lau, who grew up in Kaimuki. "‘We only have two shots,’ and they said, ‘We better give them to the lieutenant’s son,’ meaning me. ‘He’s too young for alcohol.’"

At the time, Lau was sitting on a bench, and what he saw were "buckets of arms and legs being taken out" that were from the Dec. 7 wounded, he said. "And I heard moaning, and I knew by two or three days afterwards that they had run out of anesthesia."

Seventy-three years later, Lau has a trove of equipment and supplies from those earlier days of medicine that he inherited from Capt. J. Howard Branan, whom Lau says had a command role in Navy medicine at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack.

Lau has large and small metal and wood boxes — including old cigar boxes — full of steel clamps and retractors, unrecognizable implements, sturdy steel syringe needles, and medicine in original packages.

There are procaine 1 percent and "novocain solution" 1 percent glass ampoules "for local anesthesia" still inside their original paper tubes and boxes.

Lau has small vials of epinephrine, strychnine and other tablets for hypodermic solution use, including a vial dated 1906 with pilocarpine hydrochloride.

The 82-year-old doctor figures it would be good for the vintage medical equipment to go to a museum, but he hasn’t had much luck with Tripler Army Medical Center or the USS Arizona Memorial.

"I just think this part of history should not be lost," Lau said. "Better than me taking it to a dump and getting rid of the stuff, because it’s very unique. It’s time-measured history."

The Honolulu man speculates the equipment was used in the aftermath of the Dec. 7 attack when Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor was open and later was in use at Aiea Naval Hospital.

The hospital, located at what is now Camp H.M Smith, opened in November 1942 as a replacement for the Pearl Harbor facility, which closed in 1944.

Lau, who lived with Branan part of the time as a youth, recalls the Navy doctor drafting the blueprints for the Aiea hospital. Branan died in 1956 at the age of 76 and is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.

"I consider this a gold mine of medical history," Lau said of the equipment in his possession.

Lau recently sorted through the implements and vials at the family home on 14th Avenue where his son David now lives.

"See how much trouble they went through for one (hypodermic) needle?" Lau said, holding up a glass tube with a single reusable needle inside. "The needles were not like the needles of today. You had to sterilize them," he said.

Lau’s son Mark, an anesthesiologist in Oklahoma, also got a look at the gear.

"I know they used ether — an ether mask, because that’s in there," Lorrin Lau said.

According to a Navy account of medical activities at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack, the prewar military buildup on Oahu resulted in added bed capacity, equipment and supplies.

"Supplies at the Naval Hospital were, in general, sufficient to take care of the unprecedented demands created by the Pearl Harbor disaster," the Navy said.

Morphine sulphate was given to relieve pain as first-aid and after evacuation to a hospital or hospital ship, according to the Navy.

As an Army family, the Laus over the years were "transferred every one or two years, sometimes more frequently, as the war needs required," Lorrin Lau said. He said he stayed on Oahu, went to Punahou School and lived part of the time with Branan, the Navy doctor, just a few doors down the street.

Lau said he went off to Harvard University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, returning from the East Coast in 1982 to take care of his mother. By then, Branan had been dead for 26 years.

"My mom said, ‘Dr. Branan left some stuff in the basement for you to take care of,’" recalled Lau, who is still a practicing gynecologist.

Lau wants to find a museum or other home for the old medical equipment that he inherited.

"I’d like to see it turned over (to) the federal government, to the Navy or to Tripler, to be sorted out and saved for historical purposes," Lau said.