ABSTRACT
During the First World War the number of soldiers arriving at the rudimentary field hospitals with bits of shrapnel lodged in their heads was very high, the soldiers took a long time to recover (if they ever did) and it was costing a lot of money to treat them. At the beginning of the war, the soldiers were smartly kitted out with cloth hats to wear, of the kind that look smart, but the hats only protected from bright sunshine. So, seeing the dreadful figures for head injuries, some ‘pen pusher’ somewhere in Whitehall decided that it might help reduce the numbers, if (like motorbike riders or building-site workers today) soldiers were made to wear strong, protective helmets, in their case ones made of steel. It was assumed that this would reduce the number of injured soldiers arriving at the field hospitals with bits of shrapnel in their brain. But on the contrary, after the introduction of steel hats the number of such injuries to the head increased dramatically. It might seem like just another example of those ‘health and
safety’ know-nothings making things worse …
Or could it have been that wearing the steel helmets made the soldiers more careless?
