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Most significant medical discoveries happened during military conflicts. Trends have collected a selection of the most important of them, which concern each of us today.
Key discoveries in the field of medicine are often born practically on the battlefield, when the warring parties seek to return wounded soldiers to the ranks as quickly as possible. Sooner or later, the military conflict ends, and all of humanity begins to use the new technology.
“Ambulance” in a hurry
In 1966, a study was published in the United States with interesting results: with injuries of equal severity, soldiers in Vietnam survived more often than civilians who got into an accident. After analyzing the statistics, scientists said that the matter is in the different qualifications of medical teams. Doctors saved military personnel on the way to the hospital, while civilians were taken, trying to transfer them to narrow-profile doctors. Some of the victims simply did not reach the surgeons, or it was already too late. After this report, the civilian “ambulance” ceased to be just an emergency way to get the patient to the doctor. Each car began to be equipped with a specially trained team of paramedics, who rehabilitated the patient on the road.
The prototype of the modern ambulance was born much earlier and also on the battlefield. Even in ancient Rome, wounded soldiers were taken directly from the battlefield and immediately operated on. Then there was Napoleon, his chief military doctor, Dominique Jean Larrey, and “flying” horse-drawn carts. Such wagons instantly delivered the soldiers to the field hospital.
During the American Civil War, Dr. Joseph Barnes and Jonathan Letterman developed new methods of transportation and prehospital care. Each regiment has at least one two-wheeled ambulance trolley designed for three patients.
With the outbreak of the First World War, the wounded were not only instantly taken from the battlefield, but also immediately treated. Of the 5 British soldiers hospitalized in France and Flanders, 517% were returned to duty through treatment at such camp hospitals. For the beginning of the last century, this was a significant figure.
Ambulances massively migrated to the streets of cities from the battlefield in the XNUMXth century. It turned out that the method that effectively saves soldiers also works great in peacetime.
Plastic surgery as a way to survive
Today it is not unusual for people to correct the shape of the nose, mouth, ears, increase or decrease the chest, remove excess fat from the abdomen. During the First World War, only soldiers who were badly injured by explosions or burns could voluntarily go under the knife to an experimental doctor.
The problem was not only that a person was doomed to catch glances on himself all his life. The trouble was different – the victims could not swallow, chew on their own, they could not smile, cry. In order to somehow support their soldiers, in England they even came up with a strange doll in the form of a pilot with a face disfigured by fire and amputated hands.
The first plastic surgeon can be called Harold Gillis, an otolaryngologist who arrived in England from New Zealand. One of his first patients was Henry Ralph Lumley. His plane caught fire, crashed, he himself survived, but only bones remained in place of the face, covered with pieces of shriveled flesh. The pioneering doctor took on this most difficult case and decided to take a breast transplant. Unfortunately, the skin did not heal and the patient died. On the path of pioneers, such cases, unfortunately, are not isolated.
Those whose injuries were not so severe were subjected to other manipulations: the skin on their face was replaced with skin from their hands. For several weeks, patients lived with their hand tightly tied to their face. Now such methods, of course, are not used, but they form the basis of today’s civilian plastic surgery.
Antibiotics changed the course of the war
And then there were the military. The first natural antibiotic was penicillin. It was discovered in 1928 by the British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, for which he received the Nobel Prize. While experimenting with the influenza virus, he accidentally noticed that the common fungus Penicillium notatum destroyed the bacteria in a cup of staphylococcus culture. However, Fleming was a peculiar person, he did not particularly promote penicillin, and for a long time the scientific community simply did not know the value of this discovery.
The “golden era” of antibiotic discovery dates back to the 1940s. British biochemist Ernst Chain and pharmacologist Howard Flory announced the creation of a new drug. The first fled to Britain from Nazi Germany, the second moved from Australia. During World War II, the American government was ready to sell the secret to the USSR for $30 million. However, the Soviet microbiologist Zinaida Yermolyeva said that the country itself would create a domestic antibiotic. In 1942, she discovered a particularly productive strain of penicillin, Penicillium crustosum., and managed to establish the production of an antibiotic in a war. Moreover, the mold necessary for the new development was collected throughout Moscow.
This discovery saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers, who otherwise would have simply died from purulent infections. Antibiotics became that important tool that returned entire regiments of the wounded to service. And the drug, without which in modern medicine not a single operation can do.
Medical discoveries in the Great Patriotic War
- Another breakthrough was made by Georgy Gause, a microbiologist and founder of modern ecology as a scientific discipline, and his wife, chemist-biologist Maria Brazhnikova. They own the discovery of another antibiotic – Gramicidin C, where C means Soviet. Dirty earth, teeming with microbes, was delivered from everywhere: from landfills, vegetable gardens, forests and fields. Then it was added to a nutrient solution of chicken broth and sugar, in which staphylococcus was already present, and put in heat. After a while, the empty space turned out to be only where the medicine was.
The drug had a side effect – it turned out to be toxic, it was impossible to give such injections, so gramicidin was used in the form of a paste. There was no time to test the antibiotic, there was a war, so they began to treat the wounded with it right away. The use of the new paste turned out to be so successful that already in 1943 the release of Gramicidin was put on stream. Today it is part of sprays and tablets against sore throats, treats stomatitis, conjunctivitis, inflammation of bone and soft tissues, ulcers and boils.
- At the same time, in Siberia, scientists were struggling with another task: they were looking for plant substances that could replace the usual pharmacological preparations, which were in short supply in wartime. So at the Tomsk Medical Institute was opened the siren – a cardiological medicine from the lilac plant, which helps with acute and chronic cardiovascular insufficiency. Professor Dmitry Yablokov left the following recollection of these experiments: “I lay down on the couch, the nurse injected drugs into my vein that came from Nikolai Vasilyevich [Vershinin]. Closely followed what was happening with the heart. Nothing bad has ever happened. New drugs were immediately prescribed to patients. There was no other way out.”
- Plants, in particular, conifers, were the basis for another medical development – the production vitamin C. How to make ascorbic acid from coniferous paws was invented by the chemist Alexei Bezzubov in besieged Leningrad. This invention helped to avoid an epidemic of scurvy and night blindness in the besieged city.
How the military saved millions of civilian lives
It is wrong to believe that without wars there would be no medical inventions needed by all mankind. They would definitely have been opened, just a little later and, perhaps, not in the form we are used to today. However, it would be foolish to deny that many of the pioneering achievements took place during armed conflicts, which happen all the time.
- During the American Civil War (1861-65), anesthesia began to be widely used.
- World War I (1914-18) led to regular blood transfusions.
- At the same time, scientists discovered that poisonous gases that kill all life also affect cancer cells. This is how chemotherapy, which is used today to treat cancer, was born.
- During the Second World War (1939-45) they learned to use metal plates to treat fractures.
- The participation of the United States in the Vietnam War (1964-75) gave impetus to the invention of blood freezing technology. Now it can be stored for about a year.
- At the same time, mafenide acetate ointment, developed by the US Military Institute for Surgical Research, was first used. It is an antimicrobial chemotherapeutic drug, thanks to which soldiers who received severe burns began to survive.
- After Vietnam, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD or “Vietnam Syndrome”) was officially recognized and began to be treated.
Telemedicine or treatment online
With the breakneck speed of the XNUMXst century, the military cannot afford to wait long for medical help. It may be simply impossible to deliver the necessary medical professional or, conversely, the wounded to the place of combat clashes. It is faster, more efficient and cheaper to contact a doctor by phone.
At the same time, no one canceled the medical evacuation, of course. This event is not cheap: one helicopter flight, according to the calculations of American military experts, costs $20. But there could be many more wounded. In addition, army doctors must understand which victims urgently need to be sent to the rear, and which ones can be treated on the spot. Their knowledge for this simply may not be enough. Here remote recommendations of surgeons are indispensable.
The prototype of telemedicine arose in the middle of the XNUMXth century with the invention of the electric telegraph. During the American Civil War, belligerents telegraphed for medical supplies, passed on death tolls, and organized consultations.
In all the wars of the first half of the XNUMXth century, doctors served the army, including remotely. This required means of communication, standard packing of medical instruments and preparations with standard numbering, and clear instructions. During the consultation, the doctor could make an appointment to the patient from the standard package, indicating the numbers of drugs or inventory.
Remote medicine was actively used by NATO military doctors in Somalia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kuwait, Tahiti. Through a special communication channel, they exchanged audio and video materials with consultants from an army clinical hospital in the United States. The telemedicine project is called in America Disaster Relief and Emergency Medical Services, today it is a priority for the army.
In 2021, ordinary citizens are actively using telemedicine services. The pandemic provided her explosive growth. Today it is one of the most promising medical areas in the world, the industry is growing by 19% annually. In our country, by 2030, the share of medical consultations provided via the Internet may increase to 50% of the total.
However, skeptics believe that the surge in the popularity of civilian telemedicine is a temporary phenomenon. The returned availability of physical visits, the problem with payment from insurance companies (a doctor receives less for a virtual consultation than for a “live one”), and the fact that a number of diseases cannot be cured through a screen can play their role.
But with the fact that telemedicine has firmly entered civilian life, no one argues, perhaps. If the hard lockdown scenario repeats itself and going out into the public space again feels like a trip to the front lines, seeking medical help will no longer be a new problem.