Shrapnel & Scalpels

The Ancient Greeks understood the relationship between war and medicine. As the famous physician Hippocrates said, "He who would become a surgeon, let him join an army and follow it." The medical discoveries made during wars initially benefited primarily soldiers, but, ultimately, they benefited everyone.

Promoting Healthcare Professionals

Throughout history, war has had one positive side effect – adding value to the healthcare profession. Caesar Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) realized that military doctors performed a key service for the Roman Empire (which was always in one battle or another), so he gave them titles, land grants, and retirement benefits. The American Civil War was the major impetus for improving the modern American healthcare system. Of the 14,000 military physicians who entered the war, only 527 had previously performed surgery – but they quickly learned their trade on the battlefield, even implementing new techniques. Similarly, during the Boer War (1899 to 1902), the British learned the hard way that medical planning for a war was crucial. At the start of the war, the British dispatched 850 doctors to South Africa, the scene of the fighting, but by the end of the war, there were 8,500 doctors covering 21,000 hospital beds.

And it is war that gave legitimacy to nursing. The work of Florence Nightingale and her group of 38 nurses at the British war hospital in Turkey during the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) proved invaluable to the military. In 1860, she established the Nightingale School and Home for training nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. Shortly after, nurses played an important role during the American Civil War.

Hygiene, Procedures, Medications

Hippocrates was writing about wound care and antiseptics in the fourth century BCE. Later, the Romans were developing knowledge of germs and making it a practice to boil their medical implements before using them and to wash wounds in an antiseptic known as acetum (generally made from wine). The Roman physicians' tools were highly specialized and included arterial clamps, tourniquets, and ligatures. And when it came to pain, they knew how to solve that too: they used sedatives made from henbane seeds (scopolamine) and painkillers made from poppies (morphine). It seems that much of their knowledge had to be "rediscovered" centuries later, before being put into widespread use.

For instance, during the American Civil War, the Minie ball, artillery shell canister, and bayonet created wounds that often required amputation. Many lives were lost before surgeons realized that the long arteries had to be ligated after amputation to prevent death from blood loss. The Civil War surgeons also (re)discovered that it was easier and more humane to carry out amputations under anesthetics such as chloroform or ether.

War also aided in the identification of the disease transmission process. During the Spanish American War (1898), army medical scientist Dr. Walter Reed conducted tests on volunteers and proved that yellow fever, which was an epidemic among soldiers and civilians, was caused by mosquitoes. While he didn't find a cure, he discovered that people could be protected by mosquito nets. The army also stopped setting up camps near swamps – something the Romans had discovered about 1,900 years earlier.

Advances During the World Wars

As the scope of war and its weaponry advanced, physicians saw more and more psychological illnesses. In studying soldiers' injuries to the nervous system, a physician named Silas Weir Mitchell discovered complex regional pain syndrome and phantom-limb syndrome. With the First World War's devastation, many soldiers suffered from shell shock. At first, affected soldiers were regarded as weak or cowardly. But as the war progressed, and the number of cases increased, shell shock was formally recognized as an illness.

After blood types were discovered at the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Oswald Robertson developed the first blood bank to support military efforts in Britain. In 1916, during the First World War, it became possible to replace lost blood by transfusion. The technique further improved in 1940, during the Second World War II, when Dr. Charles Drew, an American, developed a method of separating plasma from blood matter.

Then there is penicillin, which, although discovered in 1929 by Dr. Alexander Fleming, was not manufactured or used extensively until the Second World War.

The Situation Today

Although it can be argued that, in the past, many medical discoveries would not have been made without war, today that is not the case. Modern warfare involves lethal chemical weapons that fry organs and nervous systems, landmines that destroy limbs and lives, and atomic bombs that scorch skin, hair, and bone. Clearly, today, the damage wrought by modern warfare outweighs any possible value toward the advancement of medicine.

Discuss This Article

Have something you'd like to say? Tell us what you think! Read and post comments for this article.

Find a Job

Choose your career:

MedHunters is the world's biggest healthcare job board. Our job directory has 16,110 jobs with 2,333 hospitals and other direct employers.

We want you to find your next job on MedHunters. Need Help? Call us at 1-888-884-8242, email us at info@medhunters.com or sign up now.