Friday, August 04, 2006
The war in the Pacific: A doctor's diary
My blogger cousin GreenmanTim writes about the tour his grandfather (my great uncle) served in the western Pacific during World War II. He was an obstetrician who quite famously identified my mother as pregnant with me before she quite realized it herself, and saw the war through a doctor's eyes:Tuesday Feb 15 1944 - Within a few moments after my arrival at the dispensary this morning, the crash phone rang. After an inexcusable delay the ambulance got off to the field almost as another entered bearing a poor boy who had stepped into the propeller of a B-24. He was conscious but with deep lacerations over the right frontal area. On further examination under local he proved to have a compound fracture of the skull with several deeply depressed fragments and a lacerated brain. I removed the loose fragments and elevated the depressed ones, filled the thing full of sulfonamide and sewed him up tight. This was my maiden voyage into intracranial surgery - what a place for an obstetrician! God help him from here on.
There's a lot more where that came from, and it reminds us what a tough war that was. Today our Combat Support Hospitals have actual neurosurgeons, who -- theoretically, at least -- have access to mobile CT scanners and other high tech equipment. Yes, combat surgery remains unbelievably challenging and sometimes the high technology isn't available or it breaks down under pressure from desert sand or scorching heat, but 1944 really was a different world.
Read the whole thing.
1 Comments:
By 
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Fri Aug 04, 10:30:00 PM:
Thanks for letting us know about this post. It happens to fit my current research interest :-)
LGD
