![]() ![]() Two Army surgeons scrub up in preparation for a surgical procedure at a first aid station. For the first time in history, 83 of the Army’s doctors were women. From a peacetime Army that boasted only 1,200 doctors, the department eventually enlisted as many as 50,000 physicians by the end of the war in Europe. Under the taciturn direction of Surgeon General Norman T. Trained medical personnel were needed, and lots of them. ![]() Unlike the fighting branches of the military, not just any recruit or draftee qualified for this highly technical service. Army Medical Department had to swell its ranks quickly to meet the challenge of total, and global, war. Like all other branches of the military, the U.S. World War II began abruptly for the United States on a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii. But the advances in medical science in World War II were an exponential leap in the saving of lives and the comfort and recovery of wounded soldiers. Railroad lines carried them in relative comfort to rear-area hospitals, and steamships brought wounded Canadians and Americans safely home across the waters in a relatively short time. Horse-drawn ambulances and regular military hospitals with modern equipment were among the innovations.īy World War I, motorized ambulance service whisked casualties from the front to treatment centers with trained staff. The effort was led by caregivers such as Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Walt Whitman. Great strides in care for the wounded evolved out of the Crimean War and American Civil War. Surviving veterans who were blinded or deafened or traumatic amputees spent the rest of their lives as charity cases begging alms from passersby.Īll that began to change in the 18th century when better medications combined with swifter transportation became available. Gangrene and disease were passively accepted as inevitable. The common soldier died where he fell.Īmputations, if performed at all, were unspeakably primitive. Wealthy nobles who could afford it often brought their own doctors to the battlefield to treat their maladies. ![]() Armies of peasant conscripts commanded by an insensitive royalty were unprepared to adequately care for and transport men who were mutilated in war. Sick and injured men had to find their own way home from distant battlefields. Medical attention was primitive and often not a high priority for military planners beyond the officer corps. For centuries wounded soldiers of every nation were responsible for much of their own care. ![]()
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