This book provides an overview of the history of allied medicine in the Great War. Based on both primary research and secondary literature, it offers a clear and concise account of medical treatment during the Great War, exploring the advancements of the period and the human experience of the medical war.As well as covering European medical work, the book draws on a range of American primary sources and texts in order to address the American medical experience of the First World War, an area that has been neglected by the existing literature. This is an accessible exploration of the medical war, the people involved, and its impact. It is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of history taking courses on medicine in war, the history of medicine or the Great War.
The true story of Allied nursing in the First World War, offering a compelling account of nurses' wartime experiences and a clear appraisal of their work and its contribution to the Allied cause.
The casualty rates of the First World War were unprecedented: approximately 10 million combatants were wounded from Britain, France and Germany alone. In consequence, military-medical services expanded and the war ensured that medical professionals became firmly embedded within the armed services. In a situation of total war civilians on the home front came into more contact than before with medical professionals, and even pacifists played a significant medical role. Medicine in First World War Europe re-visits the casualty clearing stations and the hospitals of the First World War, and tells the stories of those who were most directly involved: doctors, nurses, wounded men and their families. Fiona Reid explains how military medicine interacts with the concerns, the cultures and the behaviours of the civilian world, treating the history of wartime military medicine as an integral part of the wider social and cultural history of the First World War.
A startling narrative revealing the impressive medical and surgical advances that quickly developed as solutions to the horrors unleashed by World War I. The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb. The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine provides a startling and graphic account of the efforts of teams of doctors and researchers to quickly develop medical and surgical solutions. Those problems of gas gangrene, hemorrhagic shock, gas poisoning, brain trauma, facial disfigurement, broken bones, and broken spirits flooded hospital beds, stressing caregivers and prompting medical innovations that would last far beyond the Armistice of 1918 and would eventually provide the backbone of modern medical therapy. Thomas Helling’s description of events that shaped refinements of medical care is a riveting account of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of men and women to deter the total destruction of the human body and human mind. His tales of surgical daring, industrial collaboration, scientific discovery, and utter compassion provide an understanding of the horror that laid a foundation for the medical wonders of today. The marvels of resuscitation, blood transfusion, brain surgery, X-rays, and bone setting all had their beginnings on the battlefields of France. The influenza contagion in 1918 was an ominous forerunner of the frightening pandemic of 2020-2021. For anyone curious about the true terrors of war and the miracles of modern medicine, this is a must read.
This work explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, the author examines in detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries. As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict.
The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.
In the World War I era, veterans fought for a unique right: access to government-sponsored health care. In the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. Burdens of War explores how the establishment of the veterans’ health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans’ benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans’ health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans’ welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1910s—when service members requested better treatment, Congress approved new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country’s largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study. -- Jennifer D. Keene, Chapman University, author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! 2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing’s Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing! The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work and worth of nursing in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research into the history of nursing moves us away from a reductionist focus on diseases and treatments and towards more inclusive ideas about the experiences of illnesses on individuals, families, communities, voluntary organizations, and states at the bedside and across the globe. An extended introduction by the editors provides an overview and analyzes the key themes involved in the transmission of ideas about the care of the sick. Organized into four parts, and addressing nursing around the globe, it covers: New directions in the history of nursing; New methodological approaches; The politics of nursing knowledge; Nursing and its relationship to social practice. Exploring themes of people, practice, politics and places, this cutting edge volume brings together the best of nursing history scholarship, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field, and is also relevant to those studying on nursing history and health policy courses.
