ABSTRACT
Guadalcanal would be the military’s first opportunity to employ in battle conditions a variety of novel drugs and procedures. The widespread use of the new sulfa drugs made infection from war wounds and resulting deaths “the lowest in military-medical experience” up to that time, with tetanus toxoid and antitoxin combining to yield no reported cases of tetanus and only one or two cases of the dreaded gas gangrene. In treating the badly wounded, physicians minimized shock by pioneering the so-called four-way infusion of plasma, saline, glucose and blood.1
