What type of injuries were common in ww1

The Great War will call into question the established therapeutic principles that were based on the experience from past wars. However, no other conflict will have provided an opportunity to observe so many mutilated bodies and persons suffering from illnesses. Physicians at the front, far from peacetime theories, will be faced with critical choices: operate or abstain.

While the first choice seems perfectly obvious to us, the second will in many cases be the only option available to physicians. When speaking of injuries, there is also the dehumanization aspect that results for the body. Physical losses are often prolonged by psychological trauma.

Over and above the injury, there are the relations with the family that will accentuate the mutilated soldier's suffereing. Wives and children find themselves confronted with a person whom they no longer recognise.

This will doubtlessly be the greatest source of difficulty for these soldiers. Just like all sciences, medicine is based on experimentation in order to draw a certain number of conclusions.

Physicians during the First World War will be faced with situations that no one could have imagined. It is through the exchanges, amongst other things, between actors in the field and in the rear that medical knowledge will be developed in line with the realities that will overturn all of the hypotheses imagined before the conflict. Physicians will distinguish the various types of injuries according to the affected part of the body.

Amongst the most serious injuries are the ones to the abdomen. Given their severity, these injuries are often mentioned in the textes written by surgeons during the Great War. Though rare, testimonials by physicians describing their immediate experiences at the front are often eloquent regarding the atrocities represented by the mutilations. They describe not only the nightmarish visions with which they find themselves confronted, but also the odours and screams caused by these injuries.

At its peak in the United States, there were deaths for every , people. However, after the end of the war, these numbers quickly came down to for every , people.

Even though the disease gradually disappeared, it left behind physical and mental scars on the people it infected. Subsequent medical research helped to develop vaccines and prevent its outbreak in the wars that followed. By the end of the First World War, the British Army alone had seen more than 80, cases of shell shock.

Shell shock was a term to describe the post-traumatic stress soldiers suffered during the war. Its symptoms included insomnia, the inability to walk or talk, and panic attacks. At the beginning of the war, shell shock was relatively rare. However, as the war progressed, the number of cases grew, and doctors were not able to identify the exact cause of the disorder.

Also, it was believed that carbon monoxide from the explosions damaged the brain tissue. Patients showing signs of shell shock were regarded as cowards, but as the number of shell shock cases increased, people tried to figure out a solution to the problem. In severe cases, sufferers were sent to casualty clearing stations for many weeks. The First World War saw the rise of many well-established and new diseases, and the treatment of these diseases provided an opportunity for the medical community to research and find new cures.

The research carried out during World War I into many disorders enabled us to better prepare for future global epidemics and wartime disease. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. Here is a list of the top 10 diseases that were common in World War I: Contents hide. Trench Foot. Trench Fever. Typhoid and Typhus Fever.

Heart Disease. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other uses directly to the museum editorial staff. From a medical standpoint, World War I was a miserable and bloody affair. In less than a year the American armed forces suffered more than , casualties, of which , were deaths. Almost 6, of these casualties were North Carolinians. When the United States entered the war in , the army did not have an established medical corps. During the war, the army medical corps copied parts of the French and English medical system that had been in use for the past three years.

This system arranged military medical staff in a practical manner. Stretcher-bearers first came into contact with the wounded and moved them from trenches to waiting ambulances. The first aid treatment these medics gave often saved lives. Lieutenant Andrew Green wrote to friends in Raleigh praising the stretcher-bearers who carried him over one mile through enemy shell fire after he was wounded in the leg.

Private Clarence C. We had to step on these dead soldiers to keep from going in the water and mud so deep and throwing the [wounded] off the stretcher. Motorized transport proved to be the fastest and most efficient way to move the wounded.

Ambulances rushed them to mobile dressing stations or field hospitals that followed the advancing and retreating troops. From there the severely injured were taken to base hospitals far behind the lines. Felix Brockman of Greensboro volunteered for the st Ambulance Company, which was made up of men from the Greensboro and Winston-Salem areas. He recorded that wounded men were brought from the battlefield to a triage area to be sorted out.

Generally there were four kinds of cases: gas injuries , shell shock , diseases, and wounds. World War I was the first conflict to see the use of deadly gases as a weapon. Gas burned skin and irritated noses, throats, and lungs. It could cause death or paralysis within minutes, killing by asphyxiation. As soon as troops learned that gas was in their area, they had to put on masks. Even having the fumes in their clothing could cause blisters, sores, and other health problems.

Bathing and changing clothes immediately helped but was not always possible. Many thousands of gas victims suffered the painful effects of damaged lungs throughout their lives. Civilian medicine is not usually practiced this way, outside of disasters.

But on the battlefield, time and resources are finite. Herculean efforts to try to salvage a patient who is likely to die may use time and resources that might better be used to save the lives of several patients less severely wounded. Spraying a Burn Wound of the Face Burn injuries are among the most devastating injuries known.

Burns have been known for 5, years, or longer. With the onset of mechanized warfare and the use of high explosives in World War I, burns became more and more common. However, therapy was inadequate. By later in the century, surgeons had realized that early and aggressive intravenous fluid therapy is the key to survival for large burn injuries. Intravenous fluids were available in World War I, and were used to a limited extent, but not to the extent required for treating major burns.

Burns of the face and extremities, while not often fatal, could still produce major disability. Therapy consisted of supportive care, trying to reduce infection, and skin grafts for full thickness areas.

Small areas could be adequately treated. But a major facial injury such as that shown here would usually produce major scarring, even after skin grafting. The best that could be hoped for was a mask-like face. The need to provide better treatment of burn wounds stimulated a great deal of research after the war by plastic surgeons and trauma surgeons. By World War II there was an extensive body of knowledge and practice available.

But this came too late for the unfortunate victims in World War I. Quick, boys! Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. Chlorine Attack Using Gas Cylinders First introduced on April 22, , the use of poison gas quickly became commonplace by all of the combatants. In the popular imagination, poison gas became one of the defining symbols of the Great War.

All of the European powers had signed the Hague Declaration in , never to use poison gas in artillery shells or other projectiles. Again, the Hague Convention of forbade the use of poison weapons.

But once Germany used gas on the battlefield, all other armies began to use it. By , one third of all artillery shells contained gas. Not surprisingly, then, about one-third of all casualties in the AEF were from gas.

Poison gas evolved rapidly during the war. That first use at the second battle of Ypres employed tanks of gas half-buried in the earth. When the wind was blowing away from their own lines, Germans opened the valves and allowed the gas to billow towards the French lines.

There were 1, deaths and 4, casualties. It was used twice more during the same battle, against British and Canadian troops. By the fall of , all sides were using poison gas, including in artillery shells. Chlorine gas, when it contacts tissue, dissolves in water to form hydrochloric acid.

Its primary target is the lung, and death usually results from inhalation injury. Chlorine can also cause severe damage to eyes and exposed mucous membranes. Soldiers Under Gas Attack Phosgene was introduced in late It was used extensively, frequently combined with chlorine.

The accompanying picture was actually staged in by the U. Army Corps of Engineers to illustrate the effects of phosgene.