The first thing I thought of was the TV movie adaptation with Ernest Borgnine and the actor who played John-Boy in the Waltons. Only the unfortunate soldier hadn’t been hit by an artillery shell, he had inhaled gas and was hacking his lungs out with the most God-awful sound.
i remember the mash tv series and triage and i *thought * i remember hearing during the series that it was only used during the korean war, not having been developed earlier.
that being a tv series, it be completely fabricated. so, is that true, war historians among us? without taking the time to research it myself (lazy), does anybody know IF triage was used during the second world war? i have no idea.
Don’t have any cites, but wouldn’t the concept of triage would arise naturally, whether explicitly called that or not, the moment you have a limited number of medical personnel designated to treat a large number of wounded.
I’d frankly be surprised if it hadn’t been practiced before WWII.
Could be wrong though.
I thought that most amputations were done as you described- Big men holding down the patient until the doctor was done with his work- but after I toured Chimborazo Hospital a couple of weeks ago, I learned that was not the case.
While morphine was in short supply at times, chloroform was not. According to the displays and talking with the guide, there were not really that many of those gruesome amputations in the field. It was pretty much an assembly line: Patient is laid out on the table, given chloroform through a cloth or device made to keep the vapors on the patient (lest you end up with a surgeon knocked out on the floor), the procedure was done and stitched about the time the patient began to come around. Patient was removed, and the process began anew. The guide said that undoubtedly there were patients who had to have procedures done without benefit of anesthesia, but that they were very few and far between.
It was very cool to see some of the instruments they used- Far from being crude devices, these were very finely made tools. Apparently there was a high demand for instruments that were made in France, as they were of higher quality than those made in the U.S. Doctors were very proud of the tools they collected, and had very ornate cases for them.
I would presume this means triage.
Modern triage was invented by the French in the first world war. Even before that though they were doing primitive sorts of triage. During the Civil War, if you were shot in the head, chest, or stomach, you were set aside and doped up with morphine so that the field doctors could work on people that they could actually save. The French triage system invented in WWI also drew heavily on principles that the French developed during the Napoleonic wars.
Triage is used during all medical emergencies of sufficient scale, and has been used since WWI (and its principles were developed during the Napoleonic wars). Quercus’s description is not inaccurate, but it’s better to say that transportation from the battlefield was rationed to those whose survival depended on it; those who would live, regardless of treatment, and those who would die, regardless of treatment, stayed at the front.
Another consideration in triage is that the third group includes those whose injuries are bad enough to require constant attention. If a doctor or medic can’t treat you and move on, even starting treatment will eventually kill several who might have been saved.