MEDICINE and PATHOLOGY
SANITATION and HYGIENE
VENEREOLOGY
PSYCHIATRY
TRENCH FEVER and LOUSE INFESTATION:
DIABETES: In 1915, eleven years before the discovery of insulin by Banting and Best in 1926, patients with diabetes could only be treated by diet and severe diabetics were condemned to a short lifetime on a very restricted and unpalatable diet before their inevitable fatal end.
This extract, from the "The Practitioner's Encyclopaedia of Medical Treatment", Published by Oxford Medical Publications, 1915, describes, in detail, the methods of treatment in the pre-insulin days.
MILITARY SURGERY: Extracts from the book, Military Surgery by Dr Edmond Delorme. Published 1915 by H.K. Lewis, 136 Gower Street, London.
We are indebted to Mr Neal O'Brien of Concord, Massachusetts for making this available.
VENEREOLOGY: Extracts from "The Practitioner's Encyclopaedia of Medical Treatment", Published by Oxford Medical Publications, 1915.
Venereal diseases were the cause of much debility and loss of manpower during WW1 (as they were in WW2). Salvarsan had been discovered in 1906 and was available for treatment of syphilis, although the older methods of treatment with mercury were still prescribed. Gonorrhoea was mainly treated by urethral washouts using medicated fluids, a treatment that was much detested and feared by the men, but was to continue until the use of Penicillin during the second world war.
The Repression of War Experience by W.H.R. Rivers, MD.(Lond.), FRCP. (Lond), FRS., Late Medical Officer, Craiglockhart War Hospital. An Address to the Section of Psychiatry of the Royal Society of Medicine, published in the Lancet of February 2nd. 1917.
Shell Shock and its Lessons By Grafton Elliot Smith, MA. MD. FRCP. FRS
and Tom Hatherley Pear BSc. Published by Manchester University Press, UK, 1917.
This book presents an insight into how mental disorders were managed during the Great War. It is divided into chapters on the Nature of Shellshock (The authors point out that the term "Shell shock" was a popular but inadequate title for all those mental effects of war experience which are sufficient to incapacitate a man from the performance of his military duties), Treatment, Psychological Analysis and Re-education, General Considerations of Psychiatric Illness and some of the Lessons learnt from the War.
The authors presents a sympathetic discussion of a group of conditions that were poorly understood and were often confused with malingering. It is of significance that many soldiers were actually court martialled and shot for cowardice, during the period when this book was published, even though they were obviously suffering from what we now know were severe anxiety states or post traumatic stress disorder.
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Last updated: 18 August 2008