Medicine and World War II

MEDICINE AND WORLD WAR II

A Medical Success

For medical science World War II was a spur to startling advances. Newly discovered antibiotics such as penicillin and other drugs were rapidly made available by government sponsorship for research, manufacture, and distribution. The war demonstrated the effectiveness of preventive psychiatry. Men who were kept near the front lines and treated could often return to active duty. New techniques for treating and storing blood plasma resulted in the saving of lives. Many of these discoveries were later adapted for peacetime usage.

Medical Education

Medical education in the United States accelerated during the war years. The training of wartime doctors consisted of three intense years of twelve months each instead of the usual four years of nine months each. U.S. medical schools geared up to produce physicians needed for the war effort more quickly, but this system was not adopted by any other of the countries at war. Some medical professionals feared the potential of a calamitous impact from this new system of training. A. N. Richards, the chairman of the Committee on Medical Research of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, claimed at least 30 percent of the physicians under forty-five years of age were men whose training resulted in superficial learning, poor discipline, and "a minimum of that contemplation and discussion from which spring habits of independent thought." Richards called for added training for them, fearing a postwar "serious loss" in the ranks of qualified physicians.

Physicians in the Military. In peacetime the Army Medical Corps personnel numbered about 1,200. To provide medical service for a wartime army of 8 million, the Corps increased to 46,000, including 52 general hospital units, and 20 evacuation hospital units. During their service in the battlefields, many physicians experienced group practice for the first time and came home interested in a reorganization of medical practice to minimize the ineffectiveness of the traditional individual practice. Psychiatrists and psychologists also joined the ranks. Over 1 million men were rejected from military service because of psychological and neurological disorders, and another 850,000 soldiers were hospitalized for mental problems during the war. In 1940 there were 25 medical officers assigned to psychiatry in the army, but during the war it had to assign 2,400 more. Psychiatrists and others later presented these statistics to show the United States had a great unmet need for psychiatric services and promoted the expansion of psychiatry as a medical specialization.

Medical Research

World War II, more than President Roosevelt's New Deal, began the great expansion of the federal government's support of medicine. The war gave a priority to medical research to protect military personnel against injuries, disease, exposure, and fatigue. Among the many problems were protection against influenza, pneumonia, dysentery, and gangrene; prophylaxis and treatment of streptococcus infections and venereal disease; discovery of a substitute for quinine in the treatment of malaria; acceleration of convalescence; prevention and control of bacterial infections of wounds and burns; avoidance and treatment of shock; methods of restoring blood volume after hemorrhage and preservation of whole blood for transport from the United States to combat theaters; procedures for nerve regeneration and nerve repair following injury; protection of aviators against lack of oxygen and cold and from blackout; means for better adaptation of men to extremes of heat, cold, and humidity; protection against poison gases; and development of insecticides and repellents to guard against insect-borne tropical diseases.

Medical Accomplishments and the War

By the war's end many medical advances became available for civilian as well as military use. Vaccines were created to lessen the incidence of typhus, cholera, and forms of influenza. A little-known drug, Atabrine, reduced the menace of malaria more effectively than earlier drugs. Treatments for measles and infectious jaundice were developed from human blood plasma. The German-made insecticide DDT, brought as a sample from Switzerland in 1942, was used during the war to battle insect-borne diseases such as typhus. Penicillin and other powerful antibiotics were researched, developed, and produced. In many of these cases the war effort transformed difficult laboratory experiments into major postwar medical industries. It took less than three years for huge supplies of penicillin to be developed by pharmaceutical companies and made available to troops as a weapon against infection. Ironically, however, even as the war accelerated recognition of the benefits of government support for medicine, it also generated demands for the postwar autonomy of the majority of physicians. Unlike Europe, which developed additional government-controlled national health systems after the war, American doctors more often than not resented their subordination in the ranks of the military and resisted efforts to establish a civilian national health system after the war. As Richards put it, for doctors, military service had spurred a "recognition that [government] regimentation in any restrictive sense is abhorrent."

MORE DEADLY THAN WAR

During World War II diseases of the heart and blood vessels were the United States' number one public-health enemy. They killed more people than the next five leading causes of death combined (excluding accidents). Although 325,000 American men died in battle, during the same period two million Americans died from heart disease. Despite the dimensions of the problem, at that time there were only 374 physicians specializing in cardiology in the United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 1945 that nearly twice as many U.S. citizens died of cancer during 1942-1944 as were killed by enemy action in World War II

Sources:

"Killer No. 1," Time (9 February 1948): 71-72;

"Medicine," Time (31 December 1945): 71:

Sources:

A. N. Richards, "The Impact of the War on Medicine," Science (10 May 1946): 575-578;

Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), pp. 344-345.