How World War I Revolutionized Medicine
When World War I broke out in France, in August 1914, getting a wounded soldier from the battlefield to a hospital required horse-drawn wagons or mules with baskets on either side. Incapacitated soldiers would be taken to a railway station, put in the straw of a cattle-car, and sent towards the nearest city with a hospital. No bandages, no food, no water. “One of those trains had dumped about 500 badly wounded men and left them lying between the tracks in the rain, with no cover whatsoever,” recounted Harvey Cushing, the head of the Harvard Unit of volunteer doctors at the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris.
Such pitiful conditions immediately beset the Battle of the Marne in early September, leaving a thousand wounded French soldiers lying in the straw in a village near Meaux. To rescue them, U.S. Ambassador Myron T. Herrick called all his friends with cars, particularly
