Sheer Misery by Mary Louise Roberts

Author:Mary Louise Roberts [Roberts, Mary Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General, HIS027100 History / Military / World War Ii, HIS010000 History / Europe / General
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The surgeon, of course, had the most visceral, intimate relation to a soldier’s wound. Only a surgeon could cut open a soldier’s body. Only he could fully assess the wound’s damage by tracing its path inside the body. There were two types of surgeons: field and rear. Field surgeons treated wounds quite close to the front with the aim of saving lives. Rear surgeons were miles from the front or back home in London. Their job was to complete operations still needed after the initial field surgery. Rear surgeons sniffed that field procedures were so hasty that many wounds were not sutured until they could be treated in rear hospitals.110 Field surgeons told them they should be happy the soldiers were alive at all.

As increasingly destructive explosives were deployed on the battlefield, wounds changed in nature and severity. In contrast to a bullet, which created a small hole when it entered the human body, a shell fragment left a large jagged edge. By lacerating human tissue in an irregular manner, and by bringing bits of clothing, dirt, and other foreign agents into the wound, a shell fragment imposed a greater threat of infection.111 Surgical reports from field hospitals, including case studies and new protocols, dominated British medical journals during the war. Taken together, they testify to the appalling effect of the new weaponry on the human body.

The new wounds presented field surgeons with new challenges but also new opportunities. On the one hand, they were frontline witnesses to the war’s filth and suffering, forced to work to exhaustion. On the other hand, treating enormous numbers of patients enabled them to gather research data on wounding, some of which they used to further knowledge and also to advance their careers. Surgeons like Captain Archibald Stewart carried a small notebook in which he recorded data on “cases of interest” including transfusions, operations, and medications.112

To the surgeon, the wound was first and foremost an object for medical explanation. Only the surgical eye had the power to fully decipher the wound and render its truth—that is, the damage it caused and its chances for healing. To do so, the surgeon brought the wound into full view, making incisions and inserting retractors under surgical lights.113 His aim was to discover the path of the foreign agent in the soldier’s body and the devastation it caused. The surgeon described this path as he would write a travelogue. We learn where the agent entered, its direction in the body, and where it stopped or exited. “The shell fragment appears to have taken an upward and outward path, entering the left side of the neck at the junction of the upper two-thirds and lower third of the interior border of the sterno-mastoid,” reported surgeon B. Reese in the Bulletin of War Medicine. He then recorded the impact of the wound’s journey in terms of tissue damage. “The fragment fractured the left superior cornu of the thyroid cartilage, passing between the external branch of the left superior laryngeal nerve and left recurrent laryngeal nerve.

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