ABSTRACT
War has always been very destructive of human life and limb, and notoriously so in the case of the Great War, yet a popular conception of the medical treatment in that war is that there had been very little advance on practice since the Crimean or American Civil wars. Amputations on the grand scale are believed to have been the only effective treatment, and the majority of wounded men are believed to have died from wound infections. In fact, however, these assumptions were not even partially true in 1914 and were very far from the truth by 1918.
