of approximately 50 included eight doctors 20 nurses and various assistants The wards were already full when Souttar arrived with some serious cases but he noted the wounded were cheerful The battlefront where opposing forces met and clashed was many miles away and the hospital staff expected the battle to keep its distance In previous wars serious injuries had generally been treated in hospitals far back from the front A WORLD OF CHALLENGES lines Yet the German army quickly pushed World War I eventually involved more than 30 countries from throughout Europe North Africa forward toward Antwerp and the hospital the Middle East and Asia Medical personnel wards wounded filled with soldiers Then had to adapt to the special challenges of where they were stationed whether jungle swamp the Germans started bombing Antwerp or the heat and sand of a desert They might itself As the city emptied the hospital face rain and mud or snow and bitter cold They might be stationed on land or at sea Each staff moved all patients to the basement climate brought new challenges in terms of the for safety After a shell landed in the local diseases and terrain garden orders came to evacuate London In a war that took place over an extensive area specific injuries and illnesses varied from double decker buses converted for war place to place Doctors in France and Russia use collected the medical staff and primarily had to treat wounded soldiers Sickness abounded in the Balkans and East Africa The patients The staff all patients and much Serbian armies death rate reached 40 percent of the equipment was safely shuttled away because of the disease typhus and other Souttar's team did not have much of epidemics in the Balkans a break before they were sent again to
an 2 TD SALICICIDENTINBERG ITT Oii id AP It Ei EE AASEAN LIIIIIIII Air German troops occupy Antwerp in
the front lines this time in Veurne They set up a hospital approximately five miles 8 km from the front Before they could get beds and supplies their help was needed The cases we had seen at Antwerp were nothing to these Souttar recalled Arms and legs were torn right off or hanging by the merest shreds ghastly wounds of the head left the brain exposed Many of the poor fellows were taken from the ambulances dead and of the others at least half must have died The hospital staff worked day and night with poor equipment even trying to amputate legs with a saw designed for fingers There was nothing else for it RETURN TO ACTION Souttar noted Either the work had to be A primary goal of wartime medical service was to get wounded men back into the fighting done or the patients had to die And there This was not a medical decision but a military was certainly no one else to do it 4 one An army that ran out of soldiers would fail Millions of soldiers died during combat or from diseases Tens of mi ions were wounded Sick NEVER LOSE HOPE and wounded soldiers often had to return to Members of the medical staff learned battle as soon as possible even if they were not fully recovered Doctors might have to release as they worked The nurses developed a patients much sooner than they wanted More system for bringing the nearly dead back than one half of the soldiers admitted to British hospitals at the western front were sent from the to life They cleaned mud off the patient hospital back to the fighting and laid him down with bags of hot water packed around him A warm saline solution administered
helped warm chilled bodies and fight dehydration When the patient could raise his head he was given hot coffee with brandy as well as morphine for the pain These simple treatments helped many patients recover to a remarkable degree For all the medical staff the work was often discouraging and horrifying as well as exhausting hard physical labor Still Souttar said We soon learnt to give up no case as hopeless 6 Without doctors such as Souttar and all the medical staff who worked with him the shocking death toll of the war would have been even higher 13
