Describe the Effects War Had On Medicine.

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DESCRIBE THE EFFECTS WAR HAD ON MEDICINE

As years of experience have shown, war can be very destructive and can cause thousands of deaths. The effect of war can be tremendous on the people living in the countries involved. However, it could be argued that different wars have contributed in different ways to the change in history. In some cases, a war has made a new change to history but in other cases wars can cause so much destruction that they have stopped a new development from taking place altogether. However, sometimes war can speed up a change hence would act as a catalyst for change. I will be looking at how previous wars have speeded up the development of medicine and in particular the Crimean war, the first and Second World War.

In the early 16th century, surgery used very painful, and in most cases incorrect methods. This was due to the lack of knowledge and lack of technology doctors had during this time. Ambroise Paré was one of the best surgeons during the Renaissance period. In fact, he is one of the earliest examples of army surgeons that developed treatments as a result of the war. One of the most common injuries during a war is gunshots and before Paré's discovery, pouring boiling oil onto them treated the wounds. However, as Paré discovered during the war, wounds heal more quickly if boiling oil is not used; it causes a lot of pain and in many cases the patient dies within hours. Paré made this discovery while on the battlefield because a lot of the soldiers had been wounded by gunshots but his supply of boiling oil had run out. So out of desperation to help the soldiers quickly he made his own mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses and turpentine and applied this mixture to the wounds of the remaining soldiers.

That night, Paré went to check on the patients expecting to find the soldiers with boiling oil treatments recovering and the soldiers with his treatment worsening. But what he found was the complete opposite. He found the soldiers with boiling oil treatments were moaning and in a lot of pain, their wounds swollen and red. Some of them were unconscious while others were already dead. From this Paré concluded that wounds healed faster if boiling oil was not used and simple bandages were better. He also started working on improving his own mixture. Even this medical improvement suggests war can help the development of medicine since it was because Paré ran out of oil on the battlefield that he found out the boiling oil theory is wrong. However, it could be argued that the discovery could easily have been made outside the battlefield even without the aid of a war as within time people would link the deterioration of wounded patients with boiling oil. This inspired ideas about non-painful treatments.

Similarly, Paré made improvements on how to stop a patient bleeding after an amputation in the course of his twenty years as an army doctor. The old treatment was red-hot irons to seal blood vessels, known as cauterizing but a very painful and agonizing experience. Paré saw the cruelty of the war, suffering of the injured, and death of many patients from shock of the cautery iron and was inspired to find a less painful treatment like he had done with the boiling oil. So Paré's answer was ligatures - silk threads used to tie each blood vessel closed, a more effective way of stopping bleeding. The idea was not new but surgeons were reluctant to use it, as it was too risky. However, Paré set about encouraging other scientists to use it and save soldiers/patients a lot of pain. So, as well as Paré's discovery that boiling oil is does more harm than good, Paré had also discovered ligatures as another way of minimizing the pain patients had to go through, inspired by his experience on the battlefield. As a result of the suffering of many soldiers on the battlefield, many doctors like Paré were moved and set on finding less painful treatments, which inspired the research that lead on to the discovery of anaesthetics in the 19th century.

He was inspired by the pain of soldiers with amputations to find out another way of stopping bleeding. Hence the war contributed to this medical improvement.  However, it could be argued that the ligatures weren't a medical improvement as doctors later found they were dangerous because threads could carry infection to the wound. Therefore, it could be said war has hindered medical development in. The ligatures may have worked better with an antiseptic to kill germs but antiseptics had not been invented and germs not discovered. It could be argued, however, that this may have started the investigation into why ligatures cause the wounds to get infected leading onto the discovery of germs and then onto antiseptic. The discovery of infection wasn't until after the renaissance and this war was one of the reasons leading up to this discovery. In fact the discovery was made even after the Crimean war took place but similarly to this 16th century war that Paré was involved in, the medical improvements in the Crimean war also contributed towards the discovery of infection. Also, during the renaissance time, hospitals were no use because of the bad conditions and bad sanitation, and cleaning methods were weak, hence infection was easily spread. However, even Paré wasn't aware of the importance of cleanliness and organization to the success of a treatment and this wasn't apparent until the Crimean war in the 19th century, despite no knowledge of these cleaning methods reducing infections.

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During the 19th century, there were also several medical developments. One of these was the improvement of hospitals, nursing and general cleaning methods prior and during the Crimean war. In a report published in 'The Times' about the conditions in Crimea during the Crimean war, William Russell revealed that too many people were dying from ill health. Florence Nightingale, rich, well educated and determined to be a nurse was appalled by the conditions of the army hospital and ships described in the report and felt strongly that soldiers shouldn't be dying from disease. The Crimean war gave her the chance to ...

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