Medicine and the War

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What impact did war have on medical treatment and surgery 1900 - 1945? Oliver Latham

Within the World War context, medical practitioners were obliged to search for new way of treating patients, in order to combat the growing amount of wounded soldiers and ensure soldiers were in the greatest health they could possible be in order to fight. It is not surprising therefore that war brought great change to the way doctors and surgeons approached medical problems and the techniques they used in order to deal with them.

It is hard to deny that war had a positive impact on the nature of surgery in Britain. It helped surgeons to develop new ways of fighting infection. Bullet wounds which frequented soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, carried infection deep into the body and meant surgeons had to search for better ways to prevent infections. In First World War Britain aseptic surgery was practised in all hospitals and success rates in operation were much higher than they had been 30 years earlier. However, on the battlefield and under the pressure of enormous numbers of operations it was often difficult to prevent the infection