When the Great War began in August of 1914, European armies had not gone to war on the continent since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. For four decades, the Germans grew stronger and the French thought of revenge and watched their former foe to the north warily. The...
In her book, Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany, Heather R. Perry, began by noting that the German veterans who were physically challenged insisted on being called “war cripple” (Kriegskrüppel) to distinguish themselves from the “war...
In 1920, the German artist Otto Dix, an eager volunteer who fought for his country and was wounded multiple times, produced four paintings of disabled veterans. In each of these paintings, the men, mutilated and dismembered by war are missing multiple limbs. Although...
Writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Caroline Alexander explained the importance of the work of the New Zealand reconstructive surgeon, Harold Gilles. She said, “While pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was Gillies who...
Before the Great War there seems to have been little attention paid to the state of mind of the patient or to the psychological well being of the medical subject. Although psychology was emerging as a separate field of study, one of the major practitioners, Sigmund...
