They don’t teach us that
Evelyn M. Potochny Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States Soldiers in line to get in a plane. Photo by Pixabay. You called in your own medevac. You’d even tourniqueted both legs, or what was left of them. And when the Chinook kicked up all that dust and finally landed, you looked so—calm. Someone read each name […]
Atrocities in Asia: Japan’s infamous Unit 731
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Bayonet practice, wherein Japanese soldiers used dead Chinese for targets. photographed by an Associated Press photographer near Tientsin. Date, 5 September 1937. Source, LIFE, Oct 11, 1937. page 30. Via Wikimedia In 1931 the Japanese army occupied the province of Manchuria in north-east China and continued to invade and occupy […]
Prisoners on leave: Vietnam veterans and the Golden Age Western
Edward Harvey Missoula, Montana, United States Vietnam War – Hue, 17 Feb 1968 – US Marines Approaching Movie Theater Displays – Photo by Nik Wheeler. Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS. Via Flickr. “I think we all died a little in that damn war.” – The Outlaw Josey Wales “So…what have you been up to?” When […]
African American contract doctors in the military
Edward McSweegan Kingston, Rhode Island, United States African American Soldiers in Cuba, 1898, Wikipedia In the spring of 1898, the United States rushed into a war with Spain but lacked adequate troops, training, weapons, transport, supplies, food, landing craft, and medical personnel. One deficit that could be corrected before the shooting started was the […]
Battle of Gettysburg
Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824-1907) was an American surgeon from Troy, New York, who in 1846 made a trip up the Amazon river to collect flora and fauna for the local natural history museum, and whose surgical feats include the first successful ligation of a traumatic aneurysm of the axillary artery in America (1857) and the […]
William Bell: photographed injured veterans
William Bell was a veteran of the American Civil War who fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, and became chief photographer of the Army Medical Museum in Washington. He took photographs of injured soldiers as part of a project to document the range of injuries among veterans. On the left, the solider is cleverly posed in […]
The psychological impact of facial injury in the First World War: outcomes from the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup
Andrew Bamji Rye, East Sussex, UK Figure 1. Aerial view of the Queen’s Hospital, c.1920. The operating theatres are in the horseshoe to the left centre of the photograph. Figure 2. The Plastic Theatre. Modern warfare, and in particular the use of artillery employed against entrenched troops in the First World War, resulted […]
Medical doctors in the army of India
Dhastagir Sheriff Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Fig.1. Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, India. “The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.” ~Thomas Campbell India, like many other countries, has doctors serving in the army as well as tertiary care hospitals that provide medical services to the armed forces personnel. It also trains students […]
Medical innovations made by doctors during the Napoleonic Wars
Craig Stout Aberdeen, Scotland The Battle of Waterloo (1815), oil painting by William Sadler. Pyms Gallery, London. The Napoleonic Wars (1799 to 1815) brought great upheaval and turmoil to Europe, with as many as 2.5 million soldiers and 1 million civilians losing their lives. French military physicians, principally Dominique Jean-Larrey, made significant contributions to […]
The Korean soldier
Charles Halsted Davis, California, United States Korean War, train attack. 1950. US Army Military History Institute. Public Domain. A fifty-five-year-old Korean man arrived at the emergency room of our teaching hospital after suddenly vomiting blood during the night. Called next morning to consult in our intensive care unit, I reviewed his chart and pulled […]