Complex war wounds led to collaboration between different medical specialities to repair unprecedented bodily damage. While there are a number of arguments centring on whether or not war advanced medical practice, war certainly led to new techniques and technologies in the field of treating cases of mutilation and disfigurement. Medical Specialities and Specialist Hospitals ↑ There remains plenty of scope for historians in the future to analyse the impact of this specific type of wounding, treatment regimens, and reception in other nations. As might be expected, analysis of mutilation and disfigurement has been confined to the largest nations: Britain, France, and Germany, and to a lesser extent the United States, with the exception of Pieter Verstraete and Christine van Everbroeck’s work on Belgian soldiers’ wounds. Sophie Delaporte’s study on the facially disfigured in France is the most specific, as it concentrates on a particular type of wound in one nation. There have been few comparative studies except for Deborah Cohen’s study on disabled ex-servicemen’s experiences in Britain and Germany, Marjorie Gehrhardt’s study of facial disfigurement in Britain, France, and Germany and Susanne Michl’s book comparing Germany and France. Ana Carden-Coyne and Jeffrey Reznick have concentrated on Britain Sabine Kienitz, Heather Perry, and Wolfgang Eckart have examined Germany Beth Linker has analysed disabled veterans in the United States. The work which centres on mutilation and disfigurement concentrates on the ways that men with specific wounds were treated in hospitals and rehabilitation centres and, after their demobilisation, the ways in which they negotiated their identity, health, and perceptions of those around them. Although van Bergen’s book focussed on wounding in all warring nations on the Western Front, much of the research which followed his book has centred on individual nations. Wounding is discussed in texts that focus on medical care in the conflict, such as Leo van Bergen’s 1999 book, Before My Helpless Sight. Since Joanna Bourke’s seminal book Dismembering the Male was published in 1996, there has been a growing interest from historians in the historiography of the impact of war, and its permanent and devastating effects on the body. Repairing faces presented a challenge to the medical profession and exposed a new type of visual horror. The nature of trench warfare on the Western Front meant that faces were particularly vulnerable to gunshot wounds. Gunshot wounds left random scars on bodies, a permanent reminder of war. Gas blistered lungs and caused lifelong breathing difficulties and blindness. Limbs were shattered by shrapnel and needed to be amputated to save patients’ lives. These innovations in weapons and unspecific targeting circumvented the basic personal safety equipment provided to the fighting men, such as helmets and gas masks, and wreaked havoc on the body. New developments in weapons such as machine guns and grenades and more frightening and mysterious weaponry such as poison gas created an unprecedented range of mutilating and disfiguring wounds internally and externally. The siege-style warfare of bombing and shelling on the Western Front meant that significant numbers of men were killed and others badly wounded on the periphery of a direct hit. This article focuses particularly on the Western Front, a battleground established early in the war, where new forms of weaponry created new types of bodily injury. While war is no stranger to mangled bodies, the First World War was unprecedented as it created a significant number of mutilated and disfigured men, many more than in previous conflicts.
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