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As the world recognizes the centennial of one of the deadliest events in world history, we bring you one of the most touching–and devastating–moments of them all. As World War One came at a time of mass industrialization, soldiers were effectively test dummies to the first devices that comprised modern warfare.
Countless soldiers were dismembered, disfigured and killed at the hands of these new machines, which placed a huge demand on surgeons and artists alike to work together to forge solutions for those who survived but were unrecognizable. One of the first was the introduction of the face mask, as seen above. Interestingly enough, it was at a time of unspeakable tragedy and necessity–not an influx of demands by a vain elite–that what is considered to be modern plastic surgery really took off, with surgeons providing veterans a face that their loved ones might recognize when they returned home from the trenches.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, which tore through Europe from 1914 to 1918 and took millions of lives with it. Though most people who would remember the event are gone, the Great War still reverberates through our lives even today. In fact, many life-saving medical innovations that we now take for granted were created during that period by field surgeons and nurses who needed to respond quickly to a number of potentially fatal ailments.
A church converted for the entirety of the war as an American army field hospital. Source: Getty Images
Blood transfusions, which help prevent patients from dying of shock or blood loss, started to be used just before the war. It wasn’t until the the war began, though, that the technique was truly put to the test.
A German blood transfusion kit circa early 20th century. Source: eBay
Sepsis, an all-too-common hospital malady back then, was beaten with the invention of antiseptics. And though it sounds obvious to us today, it was also during WWI that practicing good hygiene and cleanliness in hospitals became a prominent strategy for disease prevention. Penicillin wasn’t discovered until 1928, a decade after the armistice that ended the war in 1918. But even without antibiotics, WWI surgeons brought us out of medicine’s dark ages.
Paraplegic soldiers are cared for at a WWI base hospital. Source: State of Alaska
One of the terrible realities of life as a soldier in the Great War was gas: mustard, chlorine, and phosgene. As you might expect, the gas mask was invented during WWI to counter the toxins’ potentially fatal effects. An early version can be seen on both soldiers and war horses in this photo.
Source: The Mirror
If you want to learn about what being gassed felt like, watch as Jake Gyllenhaal reads a poem about it by soldier poet Wilfred Owen. “Dulce et decorum Est” is perhaps the best-known poem from the war. When translated from Latin, the full phrase appearing in the poem means “It is sweet and right to die for your country.”
In the last year of the war, the Spanish Flu pandemic hit. Hard. It killed 50 million people worldwide in just a few years, even before the growing number of scientific innovations that had previously saved thousands of lives.
That’s more deaths than the entirety of WWI, which clocked in at 35 million.
But there was another, sometimes lighter, certainly odder side to medicine in the World War I era. What follows is a mixed bag of medical instruments. In the first image, the package reads: “Guaranteed to contain Real Refined Radium and to be perfectly harmless.” Radium was all the rage in the early 20th century, manifesting itself in everything from toothpaste to children’s toys. It had just been discovered by Marie Curie in 1898, who isolated the element a few years later. Companies in France, America, and other nations seized on the news by claiming that radium could heal a wide variety of ills.
As the company’s brochure stated: “Weak Discouraged Men! Now Bubble Over with Joyous Vitality Through the Use of Glands and Radium.” Yes, apparently radium could fix those slacker glands and bring the user a “brisk step, mental alertness and the ability to live and love in the fullest sense of the word.” The company proclaimed that sexual pleasure was a man’s “birthright.”
This next photo shows a bizarre series of contraptions manufactured in 1919, though they were originally invented by Nikola Tesla some years earlier in 1893.
Source: Bahoukas
This grouping of alien probe-like items is a Renulife Violet Ray Machine. Essentially, it’s a quack medical device that claims to correct a wide array of problems from sinus troubles to heart disease to writer’s cramp. It “works” via low-frequency radio waves transmitted along with ultraviolet light and ozone, and could be found in reputable doctors’ offices at that time. Turn the machine on and you get this:
Source: Blogspot
Here’s a puzzler. It looks a bit like a bong, but we assure you, it is not. Not at all.
Source: Phisick
This is a French portable irrigator that can be used as a douche or enema. Its brand name is Injecteur Americaine. Really, France? How charming. Moving on.
Source: Phisick
This last oddity looks a bit like an old-timey crack pipe, right? Well, fellow asthmatics, be glad that we live in the 21st century because that assessment is not too far off the mark. Here’s how it works. Fill the cloth bag with asthma medicated powder (example: the product pictured below), get a little of it into the glass pipe, then light it from below and breathe in the resulting smoke. Such “remedies” were relatively commonplace before medical experts realized that smoking was actually bad for the lungs.
