Medical Technology, 1915 [Slideshow]

Measure of Man: Doctors today use a battery of biochemical and physical tests to check for health and disease. In 1915 the French war ministry’s medical facility used this “conformator” to screen for infirmity; it measured asymmetry in the body.

More In This Article

Joseph Lister published his “Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery” in 1867; it was one of the major milestones on the road to modern medicine. In the next 40 years, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch developed a firm basis for the germ theory of disease. In the next 40 years, vaccines for cholera, anthrax, rabies, typhoid fever and plague were developed, and a cure for malaria found. The outbreak of the First World War, however, showed that medical care lagged for those injured by the mass-produced weapons that now saturated the battlefield. Some of the medical technology here was developed specifically in response to the millions of casualties caused by explosive shells and bullets. X-ray imaging was a fairly recent invention, but had been developed into useful mobile tools for medical facilities closer to battlefields. If necessity is the mother of invention, the use of sphagnum moss as a wound dressing goes firmly in that category, given the acute shortage of cotton and linen for that purpose. In a war with such a great need for more military manpower, those who were injured were sent to medical facilities for as speedy a recovery as possible in order for them to be sent back to the front line trenches. Some of the machines devised to keep soldiers limber and strong look quite a lot like the machines we use in our gyms today for exercise. Those who were permanently injured, then as now, could only rely on medical technology to a limited extent; in 1915 rehabilitation focused largely on attempting to provide the patient with enough mobility and training to carry on a trade and so avoid being an economic burden.

The science of a century ago we can still see as crude, but we can still recognize the roots of our own system of treatments 100 years on, in these snapshots of the latest medical technology from 1915.

>View slideshow

You can peruse the history of modern medicine in the full Archive of from 1845 at .

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.