Download February 1996 - Dr. Harold C. Deutsch WWII History Roundtable

February 1997
Volume 5 Number 5
Published by the WW II History Roundtable
Edited by Jim and Jon Gerber
Welcome to the February meeting of the Harold C.Deutsch WW II History Roundtable. Tonight’s
program concerns the saving of lives on the battlefield. Our speakers tonight are Dr. William
McConahey, a combat surgeon in Europe, and Mr. Charles Aling whose father was a combat
surgeon, also in Europe.
War exaggerates the best and the worst in human nature. It magnifies every sort of human want the need for medical care more than any other. The battlefield has always been the physician’s
greatest laboratory, demanding improvisation and the courage to treat and observe on a massive
scale. Medical progress during war time is interesting to study. For example, the use of
anesthesia came into its own during the Civil War. However, surgical hygiene was still so
primitive that many of the amputees operated on by dirty hands, using filthy instruments, rapidly
died from infection. If this had taken place 10 - 20 years later when Joseph Lister’s germ theory
explained infection, many of these deaths would have been prevented. New X-ray techniques,
blood transfusions, the treatment of wound infections and burns, the conquering of disease,
better orthopedic procedures and countless other developments have been generated by war and
thereby improved medical care in peacetime. Unhampered by the restraints imposed on civilian
medical practice, military physicians have had vast experience under desperate conditions.
These conditions have often given rise to startling leaps forward in medical care that may have
taken decades to accomplish in peacetime.
World War II propelled medicine into a new era of aggressive cure and disease prevention. An
example is America’s development of a system of blood banking and transport. The military
system of blood banking was so effective that by 1943 it had become common practice to draw
blood from thousands of donors in America, refrigerate it and fly it to the battlefields of the South
Pacific and later to Europe and North Africa. Scientists developed an effective preservative to
keep blood usable for long periods of time. After World War I researchers had clarified the
mechanism of shock and medical officers were now beginning to understand how to use blood
transfusions most effectively to prevent shock. It was found that plasma, the liquid part of blood,
could be used to restore blood volume and had the advantage of being easily transportable when
dried.
The two surgical specialties that had the greatest changes during World War II were plastic and
chest surgery. The treatment of burns, the repairing of injured hands and the reconstruction of
limbs underwent a great deal of progress as surgeons understood that by restoring the structure
of a limb they could also restore its function. Prior to this, damaged limbs were, for the most part,
simply removed. The sub specialty of hand surgery was born in response to the large numbers of
injuries caused by hand-to -hand combat on the islands of the South Pacific. In 1945, the U. S.
Army Surgical Research Unit was established as the first American hospital for the treatment of
burns, the forerunner of the specialized burn center.
Thoracic surgeons, who until World War II, were involved mainly with infections of the chest
cavity and cheat wall, now began to operate on the lung itself. They learned to stitch the lung,
remove diseased portions and remove shrapnel and bullets from the lung as well as from the
heart muscle itself. Surgeons learned to actually reach into the heart to remove bullets.
With the development of penicillin, the problem of infection decreased. Penicillin had the
advantage over sulfa in that it killed bacteria rather than just stopping its growth. It became
possible to save a great deal of tissue that normally would have been cut away and many
operations that would have been mandatory could now be avoided. New techniques were
developed to increase the amount of penicillin that could be produced, so that by the end of the
war enough of the antibiotic was available to be used on the civilian population. The use of
penicillin completely changed the complexion of the civilian medicine after the war.
Not only the front-line doctors, nurses and medics were forced by necessity to find innovative
ways to do things. When the Japanese seized Java, they also came to control with it the trees
that were the only source of quinine. The U.S. either had to find either a new source of quinine or
another treatment for malaria. Researchers came up with Atabrine, a synthetic drug for treating
malaria. Testing was done on willing conscientious objectors and on prison volunteers to provide
rapid confirmation of the drug’s effectiveness.
Because of the outbreaks of typhus during World War I, researchers fought hard to develop more
effective insecticides and eventually found DDT to be very useful. Despite the problems in recent
years with DDT, Army physicians used it in every combat and occupation zone to delouse
soldiers and civilians alike. It was effectively used to delouse the populations of Naples and other
southern Italian cities. From that time until the liberation of the Nazi death camps, DDT was
invaluable in the destruction of typhus-bearing lice.
The most effective mass inoculations of combatants ever attempted occurred in World War II.
During the Civil War, the mortality rate for tetanus was in the range of 90% of diagnosed cases.
Although tetanus antitoxin was used on troops in World War I, the death rate remained high,
estimated at about 50%. But of the 10.7 million soldiers in World War II, doctors found only
eleven cases of tetanus, of whom six had somehow not been given the tetanus toxoid. Of the
four men who died, two were of the non immunized group and two had not received booster
shots. Brigadier General Elliot Cutler, the chief surgical consultant in the European Theater of
Operations during the war and in peacetime a professor of surgery at Harvard University stated,
“This is, in my mind, one of the greatest miracles of modern medicine.”
In spite of the tens of millions of soldiers and civilians who had died by the last months of the war,
it appeared that humankind’s power to heal might just be achieving some equality with its power
to kill. Then on August 6th, 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and history itself
appeared to be mocking the hopefulness of the healers. Radiation sickness made its first hideous
appearance as well as long-term certainty of genetic disturbances and then malignancies. When
the US occupation forces arrived in Japan, they brought with them medical teams to begin the
studies that have continued since as a collaborative Japanese-American effort, and remain as the
only reliable source of measurements linking radiation doses with disease.
Further reading on this subject:
The Face of Mercy: A Photographic History of Medicine at War
by Naytons and Nuland
Random House 1993
Long Walk Through War: A Combat Doctor’s Diary
by Klaus Huebner
Texas A & M 1987
Battalion Surgeon
by William McConahey, M.D.
Rochester, Minnesota 1966
Surgeon On Iwo: Up Front With The 27th Marines.
by James Vedder
Presidio Press 1984
“From Death Comes Life”
by Norman Berlinger, M.D.
“American Heritage of Invention and
Technology”
Winter 1996 Vol. 11 Number 3
We continue to ask for stories or information from our members that can be included in The
Round Tablette. The stories need not be long but rather something that you think will be
interesting to our readers.
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