The Second World War finally brought about the successful development of penicillin which could be used to combat infection in a patient after surgery. When America entered the war it gave $80 million to four drug companies to find a way of mass producing the drug which acted as an antibiotic. By June 1944 there was enough penicillin to treat all the casualties suffered on D-Day. After the war penicillin became available for civilian use.
War also helped the development of plastic surgery. In both World Wars plastic surgeons worked to repair bodies, particularly faces, damaged by gunshot and burns. Work by plastic surgeons such as Harold Gillies (1882-1960) and Archibald McIndoe (1900-1960) ensured that soldiers felt they could present their faces in public and did not have to live in isolation. The enormous number of amputations during the First World War resulted in the establishment of specialist centres such as Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton where many amputees went to be fitted with new limbs and learnt how to use them. These branches of medicine benefited from the large number of war casualties and lessons learnt under these conditions were applied to medical treatment for civilians in the 1900’s.
War also brought improvement to certain branches of medical technology such as the X – Ray. These had been discovered twenty years before the start of the First World War and were used by war surgeons to locate bullets and shrapnel. The war years highlighted the importance of such developments and machines were quickly manufactured to meet the new demands and were soon installed in major hospitals along the Western Front. In the First World mobile X – Ray units were used in order to quickly scan soldiers and so improve the success rate of surgeons. It also underlined the importance of innovative transport in quickly and efficiently treating patients. Delays in treatment could mean the difference between life and death when the wounded were vulnerable to further danger on the battlefield. The First World War saw the beginning of motorised ambulances and trains and the Second World War; roaming surgical units which meant that over three fifths of the severely wounded could be operated on within 12 hours.
Blood transfusion was another area which had been regularly tried before the 20th Century but underwent great change during the early 1900’s because of the conditions of war. With the discovery of blood groups in 1901 transfusions became widely practised but, in the years before the war, was still performed with ‘on-the-spot’ donors because doctors had no way of storing blood properly. During the First World War vast amounts of blood were needed. Many soldiers bled to death in the trenches before blood could be got to them. The search, therefore, began for better methods of storage and transfusion. This led doctors to the discovery that the liquid parts of the blood (the plasma) could be separated from the tiny particles in the blood. These cells could be bottled, packed in ice and stored where they were needed. The cells only had to be diluted with a warm saline solution and usable blood was ready. This discovery helped save many lives both in the trenches and on the operating theatre. Blood transfusion further improved during the Second World War as surgeons looked for ways in which blood could be stored for longer with some success. Civilians were also encouraged to donate blood which increased the total amount that was available.
Psychiatry, previously a small specialist area, grew during the First World War as doctors in various specialist hospitals worked to repair the emotional and psychological damage caused by war – in particular shell shock. During the horrendous Battle of the Somme in 1916, for example, there was a severe increase in the cumber of cases of the syndrome which drew the attention of medical practitioners to the psychological impact of war. In the Second World War exhaustion and battle fatigue affected men and women who were involved in combat and psychiatrists used new practices and drugs on their patients.
The Second World War resulted in the reorganisation of health services in order to cope with the high number of casualties from bombing. It gave everyone much better access to health care. In 1940 a campaign was launched to get all children immunised against diphtheria. Food rationing was introduced together with a healthier eating campaign. The diet of some poorer people improved during the war because the Ministry of Food tried to ensure that rations included the vitamins and calories which many people would not otherwise have had in their diet. It was known that the absence of vitamins in the diet could cause disease such as rickets (1921) and in the war - time context these issues were brought to the forefront. Perhaps the greatest development was the setting up of the National Health Service in 1948 which was the direct result of the Second World War conflict.
In conclusion war greatly changed the nature of surgery and medicine in the 1900’s, advancing a range of different branches of patient care. Surgeon’s techniques, for example, which were effective during the war years, were transferred to civilian hospitals after the war and brought great change. In some ways war in Britain hindered the development of surgical techniques and new medicines by halting a great deal of medical research. In First World war Britain 14,000 doctors were taken away from their normal work to cope with the large amount of war casualties. However, the war largely helped more than it hindered.
