Disease and Discoveries is all about medicine.
The First World War witnessed the greatest attempt the world had ever seen to cause wounds and death. Bodies of those killed or injured littered battlefields and in the trenches disease was rife. But, ironically, from the horrors of war came many advancements in medicine. The war spurred on doctors and scientists to great discoveries, and for the people who came afterwards the world of medicine had changed. Still, many millions of men had to die for us to benefit.
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The machine was a portable device for storing and carrying blood, bringing blood transfusions to many wounded men. Blood transfusion was in its infancy during World War One. Very little regard was given to differences in blood type until later in the war and this may have killed some soldiers. On the whole, many more men would have died if they had not been given blood
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Trench foot was caused by exposure to damp, cold and unsanitary conditions, all of which were present in the trenches. The condition caused blisters and sores which would eventually lead to gangrene and amputation if it was not treated in time
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To see what was going on, men in the trenches had to poke their heads over the parapets. Many were shot and the amount of men with injuries to their brains was higher than in any previous war. This allowed Sir Gordon Holmes, a neurologist working in a field hospital, to discover how lesions in different parts of the brain caused different results. Consequently our knowledge of brain function was immensely increased
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The poor hygienic conditions of the trenches, coupled with an abundance of rats and flies, spread contaminated faecal matter to food and water. At the time there were no antibiotics to treat the disease and many men died from it
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Gillies was responsible for the opening of a hospital which undertook solely facial reconstruction. Many thousands of men had been disfigured by gunshot wounds to their faces and Gillies and his team performed over 11,000 operations on more than 5,000 men. Before then, reconstructive surgery barely existed
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Lice were rampant in the trenches and the disease was all too common. Fortunately it was rarely fatal and most sufferers recovered after five days, though in some cases heart-failure resulted in death. Three famous British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and A.A. Milne all caught the disease
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X-rays were discovered in 1895 by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen. They had initially been used to detect broken bones but during the war, their main use was locating bullets which had penetrated soldiers' bodies
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Despite its name, the disease did not originate in Spain. To safeguard morale, reporting of the spread of the disease was restricted in all nations which were at war. Effects of the disease was reported in Spain, it being neutral, earning the 'flu its erroneous nickname
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This sounds like a large amount but with the advancements in medicine, the number killed by disease was less than it had been in previous wars. In the 19th century more than half the men who died in wars had been killed by disease
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One quarter of the people in the world became infected with the 'flu. Of these, about one fifth were killed by the virus. It is the most-deadly natural disaster ever to have been witnessed by mankind
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