9781422282830

produced appalling casualties and created new situations through which diseases were able to breed and flourish. Doctors learned quickly how to adapt. They devel- oped new surgical techniques, medicines, devices, and procedures to save as many lives as they could. “The war has served as a vast clinic and laboratory in which thousands of doc- tors have obtained experience far exceeding in scope and variety the work which the civil practitioner might expect to encounter in his private practice,” Major General Norman T. Kirk, surgeon general of the U.S. Army, said at the time. “After the war, the public will be able to draw on the services of physicians and surgeons whose skills have been sharpened by intensive practice caring for the sick and wounded.” Kirk was more than accurate. Doctors in the thick of battle found innovative ways to treat injuries and cure diseases, such as using sulfa powder, as discussed above. The use of penicillin was another breakthrough. Although Alexander Fleming had discovered the antibiotic in 1928, it wasn’t until World War II that doctors used the drug to treat infections. Penicillin was so effective that pharmaceutical companies worked overtime to make 2.3 million doses of the drug before the Western Allies in- vaded France in 1944. “Thanks to PENICILLIN,” one advertisement of the day read, “He Will Come Home!” The drawing on the ad showed a medical corpsman injecting a fallen soldier. Penicillin was one of many new tools that armies used to help both soldiers and civilians. In past wars, diseases such as typhus and malaria, each carried by insects, killed more people than bombs and guns. But in 1939, a Swiss chemist named Paul Müller discovered that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT, was a powerful insecticide . During World War II, hundreds of thousands of soldiers sprin- kled DDT powder in their tents and on their sleeping bags to kill any typhus-carrying lice. Planes doused entire Italian towns with DDT to control typhus. In the Pacific, U.S. planes sprayed the poison to control mosquitoes that carried malaria. The war also forced surgeons to develop new surgical techniques. British doctors at Queen Victoria Hospital, for example, pioneered the use of plastic surgery to piece together the faces of pilots and others who had been disfigured by fire. Surgeons, led by Archibald McIndoe, found a way to remove healthy skin from one part of a sol- dier’s body to cover areas that had been burned. Dwight Harkin, an American army surgeon, broke new ground in open-heart surgery as he removed bullets and shrapnel from the hearts of soldiers. World War II also spurred advances in blood transfusion, immunization, and anesthesia. According to a report by the Medical Department of the U.S Army, the number of cases of gangrene, a life-threatening bacterial infection that usually sets in after an injury, was extremely low in 1944–1945 (0.35 percent) among soldiers wounded in battle. During World War I (1914–1918), the rate of infection among U.S. soldiers was 1.77 percent. In addition, the army reported that tetanus, a bacterial

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HEALTH AND MEDICINE