Battlefield medicine, also called field surgery and later combat casualty care, is the treatment of wounded soldiers in or near an area of combat. Civilian medicine has been greatly advanced by procedures that were first developed to treat the wounds inflicted during combat. With the advent of advanced procedures and medical technology, even polytrauma can be survivable in modern wars. Battlefield medicine is a category of military medicine.
Chronology of medical advances on the battlefield
- French military surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-90) pioneered modern battlefield wound treatment.
- The practice of Triage, by Dominique Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).
- American Civil War surgeon Jonathan Letterman (1824-72) originated modern methods of medical organization within armies.
- Advances in surgery - especially amputation, during the Napoleonic Wars and first world war on the battlefield of the Somme.
- Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov, active during the Crimean War, was one of the first surgeons to use ether as an anaesthetic, as well as the very first surgeon to use anaesthesia in a field operation (1847).
- The first practical method for transporting blood, by Norman Bethune during the Spanish Civil War.
- Ambulances or dedicated vehicles for the purpose of carrying injured persons.
- The extension of emergency medicine to prehospital settings through the use of emergency medical technicians.
- The establishment of fully equipped and mobile field hospitals such as the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and its successor, the Combat Support Hospital.
- The use of helicopters as ambulances, or MEDEVACs.
- The use of remote Physiological Monitoring Devices on soldiers such as Equivital and Zephyr BioHarness systems to show vital signs and biomechanical data to the medic and MEDEVAC crew before and during trauma. This allows medicine and treatment to be administered as soon as possible in the field and during extraction.
The term "Meatball surgery" is a term used in battlefield medicine to refer to surgery that is meant to be performed rapidly to stabilize the patient as quickly as possible.
See also
- Military medicine
- Medical Corps
- Combat medic
- History of medicine
- Polytrauma
- Timeline of medicine and medical technology
- Textbook of Military Medicine
- Remote physiological monitoring
External links
- Battlefield Medicine - The Ancient World 2000 BC-AD 500
- Emergency War Surgery (2004), 3rd U.S. revision, Washington, DC: The Borden Institute.
- EquivitalTM Remote Warfighter Physiological Monitoring
- BioHarness - remote combat casualty care
- [1] Naval Special Warfare Command shifts from ATLS model to their own TCCC model as a result of new studies and the Iraq experience.
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