Fighting Fit by Kevin Brown

Author:Kevin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752486673
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

If war can ever be said to be ‘good’, the Second World War had been a good one for medicine. Advances had been made in the fields of burns, plastic surgery, psychiatry and, above all, antibiotics which would not have been so swiftly developed and brought into use had it not been for wartime pressures. Major Anthony Cotterell, writing in 1943, believed that the ‘harvest of suffering would be infinitely reduced by the progress which medical science has made. The picture has not just been improved; it has been transformed. In some battles the badly wounded man’s chances of recovery have been something like twenty-five times as good as in France in the last war’.153 Moreover, experience on the battlefield had shown that there were strategic advantages in paying attention to hygiene and the health of the soldiers. Compared with the Western Allies, Nazi Germany had a poor record in the medical care of its soldiers however much it may have been efficient in strictly military terms. Even worse was the record of the Red Army, the great waster of manpower. Yet, it was important that due attention be paid to the health of the soldier, sailor and airman, not only to keep him at peak military efficiency but also to maintain morale. In the democracies, there was an unwritten pact that the citizen would defend the realm but in return could expect the best available treatment if wounded in service to his country, an agreement that was to be increasingly important not only on the battlefield but also on the Home Front.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.