The Great War was one of the most terrible slaughterhouses in military history. A staggeringly high number of soldiers and civilians lost their lives in the war. The kind of wounds the new artillery could produce on a human body were beyond horror.
And yet, those battlefields were a workshop for many medical practices. In the course of those five years, medicine advanced faster than ever before. 

The Great War was the first conflict where the number of deaths from wound was higher than that from disease. During the long, ‘peaceful’ 1800s, advancement in all technologies – including military technology – was significant but seldom tasted on the ground. It was in the Great War that many new pieces of artillery, machine guns, shrapnel were first used – and on an industrial level. These were weapons that destroyed the human flesh, living behind mangled, dismembered, dissolved bodies and some of the worst wounds ever seen. 

But battlefields were not only the ground of fighting men. It was also the ground of fighting medical officials and nurses. On the battlefields of WWI, medicine leapt forward faster and more efficiently than it had ever done before. 
The sheer number of wounded and the typology of wounds demanded innovative, efficient solutions because efficiency did save lives – and save soldiers to send back to battle. 

Medicine and military 

On all battlefields, doctors and nurses were divided between the loyalty to their country and the loyalty to their patients. As much as the medical staff wanted to save lives, sending back to the fight as many men as possible was high on the list of priorities. Military discipline was always in the foreground, both as an outcome and as a modus operandi.

Besides, it was precisely the numbers of ‘cases’ and the demands of the battle – with its continual need for ‘fresh’ men – that spurred doctors and nurses to devise new ways of treating the sick, experiment, discover new practices and made the old ones more efficient. 
There was a deep need, and people stepped up to find solutions. The war presented destruction on unthinkable levels. Medicine had to try to keep up. 
It was an experimental ground of huge proportions. Those discoveries and effects trailed over into peacetime life far into the future. 

Some of the advancement done on the battlefields of WWI

Doctors and nurses made huge efforts and managed to improve an injured soldier’s chances of survival vastly. Ambulances, antiseptics and anaesthetics, three elements of medicine we entirely take for granted today, emerged as a common practice on the battlefields of WWI.

The sanitary situation in the trenches and the rearguard was such that disease and infection could prove more fatal than artillery. Cleanliness and its association with reduced infections was a major step forward during the war. 

Before WWI, epidemics had been one of the main causes of death in wars. The vaccines developed before and during the conflict improved the expectation of life for the soldiers. Generalised vaccination against contagious diseases first took place among soldiers of the trenches. 

At the beginning of the war, transfusions were still made directly from donor to recipients, which was extremely difficult, impractical and limiting in war conditions. Canadian surgeon Bruce Robertson initiated new techniques to extract blood from a donor and store it until necessary. But the true revolution was Belgian doctor Albert Austin’s intuition to add citrate to the blood for its anticoagulant properties. Thanks to this innovation, blood could be stored for up to 26 days and transported from the very beginning of the war in 1914. 

The number of amputations WWI produced was staggering, but meaningful advancement in all medical fields related to it occurred consequently. Less toxic morphine-derived anaesthetic agents started to be used using new devices that made the giving of anaesthetic easier. This allowed operations previously considered impossible to be performed, often in the very casualty station. 

The Thomas Splint had been invented in the 1870s, but only during the Great War it was used massively. It brought the chances for a soldier to survive a bone fracture from 20% to 80%. Prosthetics advanced too. The production had been small before the war. It increased dramatically during and after, with the industry using ever-new, lighter materials like different types of wood and metal. A new protocol standardised the production so that it became possible to have a prosthetic repaired by a different person from the one who created it. 

The practice of triage was invented right on the battlefields of the Great War. 

Battlefield Medicine (The Great War #AtoZChallenge 2021) WWI battlefields were not only the ground of fighting men. It was also the ground of fighting medical officials and nurses. #WWI #History Click To Tweet

---

RESOURCES

First Class – History of Triage – The indispensable tool in emergency medicine
CEUfast Blog – Nursing and Medicine During World War I
British Library – Medical developments in World War I
Apocalypse 10 Lives (The Learning Resource) – Progress in medicine and surgery during the First World War
The Atlantic – How World War I Revolutionalized Medicine
International Encyclopedia of the First World War – Medicine and Medical Service

---

---