Wine and Warfare part 8: Battlefield medicine

(TDB) - An arm and a leg

War tends to lead to the development of many things which are then absorbed into civilian practice.

Medical progress in particular has been driven by warfare: as weapons evolved so too did the medical nous to deal with the resulting wounds.

Anyone who’s broken a bone or suffered some sort of physical trauma or even required plastic surgery can thank techniques developed through centuries of conflict for their recovery – and alcohol has a part to play here too as both anaesthetic and disinfectant.

Wounds on the battlefield inflict disgusting perversions on human flesh no matter what the age in which they were or are inflicted.

Weapons now cause horrendous injuries but some of those used in the past were just as bad if not worse as they were often crude and designed to cause trauma that was quite simply catastrophic.

Swords, pikes, billhooks, maces, bayonets, large calibre bullets, solid iron cannonballs weighing up to 24lbs, napalm and shell fragments the length of a man’s forearm; it is little wonder that casualty clearing stations are described as charnel houses.

Worse still, until the end of the 19th century, hygiene, anaesthetic and good patient care were all virtually non-existent. Until the advent of ether and later penicillin, the only way to clean wounds or render a patient as immune to pain and infection as he was likely to get was alcohol.