Medical Treatment

I was very interested in this knitted bandage from the World War and I really wanted to find out more about if the Red Cross or the public were knitting bandages. Unfortunately there isn’t that much at the archive and I have been struggling trying to find information about this in books and online. So what I decided to do is, I decided to look into what medical treatments and medicals kits were like during the war.

During my research I found a museum called Army Medical Services, which is based in Aldershot, outside London. During WW1, medical services from British Army, they all found themselves unprepared by the type of war that was about to face them. During 1944, the last major war had been the Boer War in South Africa. During the war the worst conditions the soldiers faced were the water-logged trenches that were being built upon manure-ploughed fields of Europe. Unfortunately these soldiers were settable to infections by these environments and there were immediate and serious dangers of these infections from tetanus, gangrene and high velocity rifle.

As the British army was unprepared from the start of the war, they decided to make vast improvements with new technologies, processes and ideas that would rapidly make some improvements to the medical services. For example if a soldier was shot there was about an 80% chance of death by the fact that the broken bones in the leg would tear and rip the muscles inside the leg as there was always the chance they could’ve hit an artery. The end result of this fatal injury would be wound-shock, which means that they would be huge, and massive blood loss. Now the development of this new creation would be called the Thomas Splint. The design consisted of a metal frame, which the whole purpose was to hold and protect the wounded leg and this completely changed the life percentage to 82% chance of survival.

The development and evolution of medical treatment to other wounds was becoming very similar to the start of the war. As the war progressed, new and exciting ideas and designs about neurosurgery up rose with new technologies such as the very first X-ray. This groundbreaking technology would allow surgeons to locate, identify and remove bullet and shell fragments from wounds. This technology has now become well in advance in the present day.