Battlefield Medicine Quotes

My wife volunteered her services as Red Cross nurse, insisting upon being sent to the front, in order to be as near me as could be, but it developed later that no nurse was allowed to go farther than the large troop hospitals far in the rear of the actual operations.

So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.

A doctor in a hospital told me that when the mujaheddin were fighting in the early Nineties, he often performed amputations and Caesarean sections without anesthesia because there were no supplies.

I was called up in the war and sent to a hospital. I dressed wounds, applied iodine, gave enemas, did blood transfusions. If the doctor ordered: "Brecht, amputate a leg!", I would reply, "Certainly, Your Excellency!", and cut off the leg. If I was told, "Perform a trepanning!" I opened the man's skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could.

The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.

The instruments of war can be manufactured ... human blood cannot be; and the lack of just one pint could mean the life of an American serviceman.

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.

Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks.

My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel--not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.

Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

The medics generally see the worst of the worst. They see everything. They're working on their friends, and they're working on their enemy. The person that was just firing at them, trying to kill them, five minutes ago, if an Army medic stumbles upon him and he's still alive, he just goes to save his life.

Concentrated serum albumin fractionated from blood plasma was effective in battlefield treatment of shock.