Medical Treatment in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

Summary

The script explores the remarkable medical advancements during WWI, highlighting the challenges faced by armies in treating wounds, diseases, and the effects of poison gas and shell shock. It details the British evacuation plan and the evolution of medical facilities, from frontline aid to sophisticated hospitals. The war spurred innovations like blood transfusions, motorized ambulances, and the use of maggots for wound healing, significantly improving survival rates and laying the foundation for modern medical systems.

Takeaways

• 🔬 The First World War saw unprecedented advancements in medical technology and treatment, surpassing any other four-year period in history.
• 🏥 The Western Front's stalemate allowed for the development of organized and structured medical systems, including specialized hospitals and advanced treatment facilities.
• 🚑 Motorized ambulances and mobile X-ray machines were introduced to quickly transport and diagnose wounded soldiers on the battlefield.
• 🩺 The British army had a detailed evacuation plan that included Regimental Aid Posts, Advanced Dressing Stations, and Casualty Clearing Stations for treating wounded soldiers.
• 🌐 Different fronts faced unique medical challenges; for example, the Eastern Front's fluctuating nature made it difficult to establish semi-permanent medical facilities.
• 🦟 Malaria was a significant issue on the Salonika Front, with up to 40% of British and French soldiers disabled by the disease, which killed more troops than combat.
• 💉 Blood transfusions and blood banks were significant medical innovations that emerged from the war, greatly improving the survival rates of wounded soldiers.
• 🩹 Sphagnum moss was discovered to have antiseptic properties and became an effective dressing for war wounds, promoting faster healing.
• 🐛 The medicinal properties of maggots were discovered, as they cleaned wounds by eating dead tissue and promoting the growth of healthy tissue, a treatment that was ahead of its time.
• 🛡️ The Thomas splint was a game-changer in treating broken femurs, reducing the mortality rate from 80% in 1914 to a survival rate of 80% by 1916.
• 🌟 The organized chain of medical treatment developed during the war laid the foundation for modern medical systems, including hospitals, clinics, and ambulance services.

Q & A

What was the state of medical advancements during the First World War compared to other periods in history?

Medicine advanced more in the four years of the First World War than in any other four-year period before or since, due to the rapid and frequent developments in medical treatment and technology.

Which countries were considered the world leaders in medicine at the beginning of the war?

At the start of the war, the world leaders in medicine were France, Germany, Britain, and Austria-Hungary.

What were the main challenges faced by the Armies' Medical Corps during the war?

The Armies' Medical Corps faced challenges such as treating wounds, disease, poison gas victims, flamethrower victims, shell shock, and improving sanitary conditions in the trenches.

How did the British army Medical Corps organize the evacuation and treatment of wounded soldiers?

The British army Medical Corps had a structured evacuation plan that included Regimental Aid Posts, advanced Dressing Stations, and Casualty Clearing Stations, which were large units with medical officers and staff to provide comprehensive treatment.

What role did nurses play in the war, and how did the Russian situation differ in this regard?

Nurses played a crucial role in treating the wounded. In Russia, they faced challenges in transporting nurses to where they were needed, and the Tsarina and her daughters also served as nurses, although they were often posted far from the front lines.

What specific medical challenges did the Eastern Front present that were different from the Western Front?

The Eastern Front was not static like the Western Front, making it difficult to build semi-permanent medical facilities. This resulted in wounded soldiers often waiting days for basic medical care.

How did the Salonika Front present unique medical challenges?

The Salonika Front was plagued by malaria, which disabled up to 40% of the British and French soldiers and killed more troops there than combat did.

What were some of the significant medical advancements that emerged from the war?

Advancements included the use of Cellucotton, blood transfusions, blood banks, motorized ambulances, mobile X-ray machines, the invention of plastic surgery, and the discovery of the sterile properties of maggots for wound treatment.

How did the use of maggots in wound treatment offer a medical breakthrough during the war?

Maggots were found to have medicinal properties, as they ate only dead tissue, cleaned wounds, crawled into recesses for treatment, and promoted the growth of healthy tissue due to their antiseptic effects.

What was the impact of the Thomas splint on the survival rate of soldiers with broken femurs?

The Thomas splint drastically improved the survival rate of soldiers with broken femurs. In 1914, 80% of such soldiers died, but by 1916, 80% survived thanks to the splint.

How did the medical advances during the war contribute to the development of modern medical systems?

The advances in medical treatment and technology, particularly the organization and chain of treatment, led to the creation of modern medical systems including hospitals, clinics, and ambulance services, transforming healthcare from local general practitioners or small charity-run hospitals.

Outlines

00:00

🩺 Medical Advancements During World War I

The First World War spurred significant technological progress, particularly in medicine. The four years of war led to more medical advancements than any other similar period in history. The episode focuses on medical treatment, highlighting how armies' medical corps had to tackle various challenges such as treating wounds, diseases, gas and flamethrower victims, and improving trench sanitation. The structured evacuation process on the Western Front, where wounded soldiers were transported from the front lines to specialized hospitals, is discussed in detail, showcasing the importance of timely medical attention. Despite the challenges, medical facilities were better organized on the Western Front compared to other fronts like the Eastern Front, where the dynamic nature of the battlefields made establishing semi-permanent facilities difficult.

05:01

💉 Challenges and Innovations in Medical Treatment Across Different Fronts

The death of many doctors led to foreign nationals joining the Russian Medical Corps, including American surgeon Dr. Malcolm Grow, who later became the first Surgeon General of the U.S. Air Force. The paragraph also highlights the impact of malaria on the Salonika Front, where more soldiers died from malaria than combat. The poor sanitary conditions in the trenches, compounded by mud, filth, and scarce food, made soldiers more susceptible to diseases, sometimes more deadly than combat itself. Despite these conditions, the war catalyzed numerous medical advances, including the development of cellucotton, blood transfusions, plastic surgery, and the use of maggots for wound cleaning. The advancements in medical treatment during the war significantly increased soldiers' survival rates, laying the foundation for modern medical systems.

Keywords

💡Technological Progress

The First World War, despite its devastation, was a period of significant technological advancements. This term refers to the rapid developments across various fields, including medicine, transportation, and weaponry. The video highlights that medical technology, like blood transfusions and X-rays, saw unprecedented growth during this time, driven by the urgent need to treat millions of wounded soldiers.

💡Medical Corps

The Medical Corps were specialized military units responsible for providing medical care to soldiers. These units played a crucial role in treating wounds, diseases, and other health issues arising on the battlefield. The video explains how different armies, such as the British and German forces, organized their medical evacuation and treatment processes, showcasing the structured systems developed to save lives during the war.

💡Casualty Clearing Stations

Casualty Clearing Stations were large medical units located near the front lines, where soldiers received more comprehensive care after initial treatment. The video describes these stations as the first places where soldiers encountered hospital-like facilities, including operating rooms and nurses. These stations could treat hundreds to thousands of soldiers during intense combat.

💡Malaria

Malaria was a significant health challenge on the Salonika Front, where the disease incapacitated large numbers of soldiers. The video discusses how this illness was more deadly than combat itself in this region, with up to 40% of British and French troops affected. The impact of malaria on military operations underscores the varied medical challenges faced on different battlefronts.

💡Blood Transfusions

Blood transfusions were one of the major medical advancements that emerged from the First World War. The need to save lives on the battlefield led to the development of blood banks and improved techniques for transfusions. The video highlights how these innovations played a crucial role in treating the wounded and marked a significant step forward in medical practice.

💡Thomas Splint

The Thomas splint was a medical device that drastically improved survival rates for soldiers with broken femurs. Before its introduction, 80% of soldiers with such injuries died, but by 1916, 80% survived. The video uses this example to illustrate how medical innovations during the war directly contributed to saving lives and altering medical practices.

💡Plastic Surgery

Plastic surgery was developed during the war to help soldiers disfigured by severe injuries, especially facial wounds. The video explains how the war’s high number of disfigured men prompted the invention of reconstructive techniques, allowing those soldiers to reintegrate into society. This innovation is an example of how medical needs during the conflict led to long-term advancements.

💡Maggot Therapy

Maggot therapy involves using maggots to clean wounds by consuming dead tissue while leaving healthy tissue untouched. The video discusses how this treatment was discovered after doctors noticed that wounds infested with maggots were cleaner and less infected. This surprising discovery highlights the war’s role in advancing unconventional yet effective medical treatments.

💡Sanitary Conditions

Sanitary conditions in the trenches were notoriously poor, with soldiers exposed to filth, stagnant water, and decomposing bodies. The video emphasizes how these conditions led to widespread infections and diseases, making medical treatment even more challenging. Addressing such sanitary issues was a key focus for medical teams throughout the war.

💡Chain of Evacuation

The chain of evacuation refers to the organized system for moving wounded soldiers from the battlefield to medical facilities. The video describes how this process was carefully structured, with multiple stages from initial aid posts to base hospitals. The efficiency of this system was crucial in improving survival rates and represents one of the significant organizational advancements in wartime medicine.

Highlights

The First World War saw more medical advancements in four years than any other four-year period in history.

France, Germany, Britain, and Austria-Hungary were the world leaders in medicine at the start of the war.

Medical Corps faced challenges in treating wounds, diseases, poison gas victims, and improving trench sanitary conditions.

The Western Front's stalemate allowed for well-organized medical systems and specialized hospitals.

Wounded soldiers were evacuated through a structured process from the front lines to Casualty Clearing Stations.

Casualty Clearing Stations functioned as full-service hospitals with operating tents and were the first place soldiers saw nurses.

British X-Ray machines were used from the beginning of the war, aiding in medical treatment.

Russian medical challenges included transporting new nurses and lack of initial medical reception plans for wounded soldiers.

Different fronts had unique medical problems, such as malaria on the Salonika Front affecting up to 40% of soldiers.

Mud, filth, and poor sanitary conditions in the trenches led to widespread illness and disease.

The Spanish flu was as deadly as combat, affecting American soldiers even during training.

Innovations like Cellucotton, blood transfusions, and blood banks emerged from the war.

Motorized ambulances and mobile X-ray machines improved the speed and efficiency of medical care.

Plastic surgery was developed for disfigured soldiers, allowing them to lead more normal lives.

Morphine was extensively used as an effective painkiller during the war.

Sphagnum moss was discovered to be an excellent dressing for war wounds due to its antiseptic properties.

Maggots were found to have medicinal properties, cleaning wounds and promoting healthy tissue growth.

Advances in medical treatment and technology significantly increased the survival rate of wounded soldiers.

The Thomas splint drastically reduced the mortality rate of soldiers with broken femurs from 80% to 20%.

The organized medical systems developed during the war laid the foundation for modern hospital, clinic, and ambulance services.

Transcripts

The First World War, for all of its horrors, was a time of enormous technological progress.

We talk in our regular episodes about the developments in flight, submarines, motorized

vehicles, soy sausages, the zipper, and so forth, but perhaps nowhere did advances come

as quickly and as often as in the field of medicine.

In fact, medicine advanced more in the four years of the war than in any other four-year

period in history either before or since.

I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about medical treatment during

the First World War.

Yes, medical treatment.

We’ll cover other aspects of medicine in other specials, since it’s a very large

topic.

When the war began, the world leaders in medicine were France, Germany, Britain, and Austria-Hungary.

Russia did have fine doctors, but not so many when compared to its enormous population.

Armies’ Medical Corps were called on to treat wounds, disease, poison gas victims,

flamethrower victims, shell shock, and also to improve sanitary conditions in the trenches.

The work was extremely difficult, often dangerous, and had a myriad of challenges according to

each battlefront.

The initial challenge was to bring a wounded man away from the fighting to a medical facility,

since the sooner you received medical attention, the more likely you were to survive.

Many wounds were also contaminated and infected by the filth and the mud of life on the front

or in the trenches.

The Western Front, because of the stalemate, allowed the medical Corps to have well-organized

structured systems running from the front lines back to base, and even specialized hospitals

far from the front or back home in Britain, France, or Germany.

Wounded soldiers would be carried by stretcher bearers, often themselves under fire, to a

first aid station where wounds could be temporarily treated to allow further transport to more

sophisticated and better equipped facilities.

The British army Medical Corps, as an example, had an evacuation plan as follows.

Stretcher-bearers brought the wounded to a Regimental Aid Post, then an advanced Dressing

Station, where the particular case would begin to be documented, and then they’d be transported

to a Casualty Clearing Station, which was a large unit with seven medical officers and

a substantial staff to help the doctors.

If they were expecting combat, then surgical teams would join these stations.

They were about 20 kilometers from the front, and usually treated a minimum of 200 soldiers,

though this number could exceed 1,000 during heavy fighting.

This was really the first place the soldier entered that was like a full-service hospital;

with actual operating tents and rooms, and the first place he’d see a nurse.

It might well also be the last, as evidenced by the large military cemeteries located near

Casualty Clearing Stations.

A side note here - the British had used X-Ray machines in the Boer Wars, so they had them

here pretty much from the beginning of this war.

Badly wounded soldiers might remain at the stations for a few weeks, and then be sent

to General, Stationary, or Base Area Hospitals, specialized hospitals for victims of gas,

venereal disease, shell shock, or epidemics.

They might also be sent to a hospital back home.

In the German army, wounded soldiers wore two information tags.

One to show what injury was diagnosed and the other to show what treatment had already

been given.

As you may imagine, whatever the soldier’s nationality, if he had superficial wounds

he may well be glad to enter the chain of evacuation to have a break from the front

until it was determined that he needed no further treatment and was sent back up.

Russia was faced with different problems.

For example, they trained thousands of new nurses but had a tough time transporting them

to where they were needed.

Interestingly, the Tsarina and her daughters became nurses, and as you may imagine, nurses

with titles were able to get postings far from the gruesome reality of the front.

When the war broke out, the first wounded Russians were put on trains and sent to Petrograd,

where they were just left at the station because no plans had been made to receive them.

Now, the Eastern Front was not static like in the west and so you couldn’t really build

semi-permanent medical facilities, and the fluctuations in the Eastern Front kind of

assured that soldiers quickly getting good medical treatment would be few and far between.

By 1917, wounded Russian soldiers, loaded onto trains, might wait four or five days

for basic medical care.

The death of doctors prompted foreign nationals to join the Russian Medical Corps.

American surgeon Dr. Malcolm Grow volunteered, was eventually awarded the Cross of St. George

by the Tsar personally, and would later become the first Surgeon General of the United States

Air Force and a Major General.

As I said, different fronts presented different problems, and one real front-specific problem

was malaria on the Salonika Front.

Up to 40% of the British and French soldiers there were disabled by malaria, and it killed

more troops there than combat did.

People referred to the Salonika Expeditionary Force one giant infirmary.

During the course of the war, over 1.5 million troops in total were infected with malaria.

But that was just a fraction of the millions upon millions of sick and wounded soldiers

the war produced.

Mud, filth, feces, rotting corpses, stagnant water, rats, and tightly packed men in trenches

produced some of the worst sanitary conditions possible.

When food was scarce, things got even worse as soldiers became more susceptible to disease.

Illnesses and epidemics were sometimes more deadly than the war itself.

The Spanish flu, which we’ll cover in detail later on, took about as many American soldiers

as combat did, and they were being ravaged by it even while still training at home in

the states.

But as a result of the enormous number and variety of wounds and illnesses, medicine

made great leaps and bounds.

Cellucotton, blood transfusions, and blood banks were big advances that grew out of the

war.

Motorized ambulances transported the wounded at a faster rate and mobile x-ray machines

could scan the wounded immediately.

Plastic surgery was invented for the hundreds of thousands of disfigured men whose faces

were too terrifying for them to lead normal lives.

Morphine had been around for decades, but it was used extensively and effectively as

a painkiller, and sphagnum moss turned out to be an excellent dressing for war wounds.

It’s light, has antiseptic properties, absorbs many times its own weight in fluids, and grows

throughout Britain.

Another thing that was discovered was the sterile properties of maggots.

Yeah, you heard that right.

A badly wounded soldier stuck in no-mans land for two days was finally brought in.

The wounds he had were typically fatal because of infection, but the doctor attending him

saw that the wounds were clean; there was new pink growth, and no infection.

The wound WAS, though, covered in maggots.

That doctor was a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School and he publicized

his findings.

Research found that the maggots had medicinal properties; they ate only dead tissue, so

they in fact cleaned the wounds, they crawled into tiny recesses where topical antiseptics

couldn’t be applied, they gave off urea, which itself is an antiseptic that destroys

staphylococcus and other bacteria, and they promoted the growth of healthy tissue.

Penicillin wasn’t invented yet and until it became widespread, maggots were cutting

edge medical treatment.

They’ve even made a comeback today for use with certain skin ulcers.

The advances in medical treatment and medical technology changed the nature of war and the

wounded.

When the war began, if you were badly wounded you very probably died, but by 1918 you very

probably lived.

That is an enormous difference.

Even because of just one advance, the Thomas splint, you could see a huge difference.

In 1914, 80% of soldiers with broken femurs died, but because of the splint, by 1916 80%

of soldiers with broken femurs lived.

But the advances in the organization of medicine, and the chain of treatment, particularly caused

by the stalemate of the Western Front, were reflected first at home in Britain, France,

and Germany, and then the rest of the world, with chains of organization eventually creating

the modern medical systems of hospitals, clinics, and ambulances that we rely on today, rather

than simply a local general practitioner or a cottage hospital run by a charity.

And that is perhaps the biggest advance of them all.

Thanks to John Dewar Gleissner for helping with the research for this episode.

He actually wrote a whole book about the use of maggots in medicine and you can check that

out by following the link in the dublidu.

If you want learn more about the live in the trenches and the conditions there, you can

click right here to check out our first ever special episode.

See you next time.