“Mash” Today - Medicine, War, and Writing

[Dover]

“Mash” Today: Medicine, War, and Writing
Edward Tick, PhD, Captain Frank Hill

The front lines of health and healing today are everywhere around our country and the world, where individuals, societies and ecosystems are at risk. On these lines and often unheralded, courageous healers and communities utilize traditional, scientific, humanistic, communal, holistic, and spiritual resources to address our most pressing global health issues. FIELD REPORTS offers reports from these front lines about significant health crises, concerns, and healing approaches that occur beyond our usual horizon of vision. Our concern is for world health. We seek to hoist flags of hope.


Perhaps nowhere on our planet are the front lines of health and healing more desperately demonstrated than on the battlefield. As has been true throughout the millennia, soldiers today face terrible life-and-death conditions and are challenged to survive through the greatest courage, compassion, determination, wisdom, brotherhood and sisterhood, training, and skill they can muster. The demands and conditions of combat are made all the more desperate by the nature of modern technological warfare that does not distinguish between soldier and civilian, enemy tank and children’s schoolhouse.

Medicine and war

Sadly, war and medicine have evolved together. We invent new means of destruction as well as new means to help heal that destruction at one and the same time. This duality has been known since ancient times. It is symbolized in Greek mythology by the two sons of Asklepios, the ancient god of healing. These men, trained in medicine by their father, served simultaneously as warriors and healers of the Greek army at Troy.

There are endless examples of how war and healing have developed in tandem. In the ancient world, Roman legions on the march protected established Asklepian medical sanctuaries or built new ones to serve their wounded. In modern history, during the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale first introduced the practice of sanitation in military hospitals. Of equal importance, she modeled compassion, commitment to patient care, and diligent hospital administration as perquisites to healing. The American Civil War developed and expanded the use of the ambulance corps and of anesthesia. World War II was the proving ground for sulfa drugs, penicillin, quinine, morphine, and blood plasma transfusions. Though all were discovered earlier, they came into prominent development and use during that war. They saved countless soldiers’ lives and proved to be great boons when utilized in civilian society later.

What of the men and women on the front lines, the ones who must provide treatment to the wounded and oversee their care? Doctors, nurses, medics, and medical support staff are often among the most beloved of servicemen and women. They are also the most severely taxed. Combat soldiers may rest between battles. Medical personnel do not. The wounded keep coming and many keep dying. Beth Marie Murphy, a nurse on the hospital ship USS Sanctuary stationed off Da Nang during the Vietnam War, tended both American soldiers and wounded Vietnamese civilians. She explains:

One of my lasting memories is how I did not know the names of the soldiers who came through my ward. The reason—there were so many of them. Every day brought new casualties, usually with multiple amputations—young strong fellows who would now live lives of disability. After a while I lost the ability to feel any kind of emotions—I had a job to do. Beyond four months I have no memories of individual days—it is all a blur. I don’t remember faces and certainly no names. Why? I believe that emotional stress and strain overwhelmed me and the only way I could survive was to not really see them.

It is no different in our new wars. Modern weaponry causes terrible destruction and wounding, whereas miraculous modern medical procedures used on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, and elsewhere save lives that would have been lost in previous wars. During this chaos, ordinary men and women do their best to achieve what healers throughout the ages have always sought—to preserve life and reduce suffering.

What are these units like today? What do the men and women serving in them experience? How do they reduce trauma and suffering to their patients and themselves? How do they cope with the relentless exposure to the worst wounds modern military technology can inflict? How do they sustain themselves, find hope, and create meaning while serving in the bowels of hell?...cont'd

http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/1550-8307/PIIS1550830706004812.pdf