Medical benefits of the Great War
Jan 29, 2014 19:59:33 GMT
Post by Deleted on Jan 29, 2014 19:59:33 GMT
Commemoration of the "Great War" has already begun this year in France and will obviously continue until 2018. In Europe at least, this was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, even worse than the pandemic of Spanish flu in 1918, which was actually an offshoot of the war due to troop movements and the return to the home countries.
The first item on which the media is focusing concerns the great medical advances that were made because of the war. For example, people with serious leg injuries in 1914 died. In 1915, they were amputated but often survived. In 1916 and 1917, they were handicapped for life, but by 1918, quite a few of them received treatment that allowed them to walk normally again. Quite a lot of this progress was due to something that seems so simple and obvious to us now -- disinfectants. If they had just poured pure alcohol onto a lot of the wounds right from the start (ignoring the unfortunate screams of pain), many more lives could have been saved. But nobody knew it.
Field hospitals were invented during this war and also saved tens of thousands of lives. Marie Curie even helped to invent a portable X-ray unit, and you can imagine how complicated that must have been. Power supply? Development of X-ray films on the battlefield... the mind boggles.
The Great War also gave rise to the invention of reconstructive surgery. So many people who normally would have died were now alive and they looked absolutely horrible, especially when their faces no longer existed. There was an excellent French movie about this a number of years back, called (in English) "The Officers' Ward" the title of which also unfortunately informs us what sort of disfigured survivor received priority treatment. This was the invention of cosmetic surgery, which has gone so tragically wrong in recent years from what you can see in the "people" magazines.
And finally, the other discovery from the Great War was the imperative need of psychiatric treatment for the troops. The event was so traumatic that even soldiers who had not had any physical injuries came back.... crazy. This seems so obvious to us now, but it was a brand new discovery back then. In modern times, psychiatrists are an integral part of any military force being sent somewhere.
That in itself tells us something devastatingly horrible about war of any kind.
The first item on which the media is focusing concerns the great medical advances that were made because of the war. For example, people with serious leg injuries in 1914 died. In 1915, they were amputated but often survived. In 1916 and 1917, they were handicapped for life, but by 1918, quite a few of them received treatment that allowed them to walk normally again. Quite a lot of this progress was due to something that seems so simple and obvious to us now -- disinfectants. If they had just poured pure alcohol onto a lot of the wounds right from the start (ignoring the unfortunate screams of pain), many more lives could have been saved. But nobody knew it.
Field hospitals were invented during this war and also saved tens of thousands of lives. Marie Curie even helped to invent a portable X-ray unit, and you can imagine how complicated that must have been. Power supply? Development of X-ray films on the battlefield... the mind boggles.
The Great War also gave rise to the invention of reconstructive surgery. So many people who normally would have died were now alive and they looked absolutely horrible, especially when their faces no longer existed. There was an excellent French movie about this a number of years back, called (in English) "The Officers' Ward" the title of which also unfortunately informs us what sort of disfigured survivor received priority treatment. This was the invention of cosmetic surgery, which has gone so tragically wrong in recent years from what you can see in the "people" magazines.
And finally, the other discovery from the Great War was the imperative need of psychiatric treatment for the troops. The event was so traumatic that even soldiers who had not had any physical injuries came back.... crazy. This seems so obvious to us now, but it was a brand new discovery back then. In modern times, psychiatrists are an integral part of any military force being sent somewhere.
That in itself tells us something devastatingly horrible about war of any kind.