Tag: War and Veterans
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African American contract doctors in the military
Edward McSweeganKingston, Rhode Island, United States 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 lack of doctors. George Sternberg, the Army Surgeon General,…
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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…
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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…
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The psychological impact of facial injury in the First World War: Outcomes from the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup
Andrew BamjiRye, East Sussex, UK Modern warfare, and in particular the use of artillery employed against entrenched troops in the First World War, resulted in a large number of facial wounds in all armies. Surgeons were unprepared. Advances in the management of infection and surgical shock resulted in better survival from wounds that would previously…
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Combat hospital chaplain
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States “Chaps, how would you like the opportunity to leave your family and your church for a year?” I asked over the phone in an almost gleeful tone. “Jack, if the question was not coming from you, I would think your question was a joke.” I had served with this…
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He is not coming back
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, United States “Good evening, skipper.” Several of my senior officers were smoking an evening cigar, seated on the base of one of the large concrete barriers that surrounded our tent hospital. An evening gripe session of the ACC (Arijan Cigar Club) was in full swing. No one stood or saluted, nor…
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Negotiation
Jack RiggsMorgantown, West Virginia, USA “We appreciate what you Americans have done for us in the past. But we will not allow you to come into our hospital uniformed and armed.” It was their country, their hospital, and their rules. She was the hospital administrator, a woman in a Muslim country but clearly the unchallenged…
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“Mental Cases” by Wilfred Owen: The suffering of soldiers in World War I
Alice MacNeillOxford, United Kingdom Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?Ever from their hair and through their hand palmsMisery swelters.…