AN EXTRAORDINARY ACHIEVEMENT IN HUMAN UPBUILDING
April 17, 1918
Major E. C. Simmons, of St. Louis, the manager of the Southwestern Division of the American Red Cross, has just returned from our army in France. He relates a really extraordinary achievement of the division of orthopædic surgery with the army under the direction of Surgeon-Major Joel E. Goldthwaite.
All the divisions of troops sent across, of course, contain a number of men who show physical shortcomings under the strain of actual campaigning. In General Edwards’s division these men numbered in the neighborhood of fifteen per cent, not an unusual proportion in the history of past wars. Dr. Goldthwaite got permission to try his hand on the treatment of a body composed of somewhat over five hundred of them, and instantly began vigorous but careful work to build up all their physical defects.
As his work for each man was finished, he was put in one of four classes. Class A included those to whom the training gave such vigor that they were fit to go right to the front as battle units. Class B included those who could be made fit for hard physical labor back of the front, although not for the tremendous strain of the trenches. Class C included those fitted for clerical and similar duties. Class D included those whose physical condition would not be improved and who had to be sent home.
Dr. Goldthwaite was able to place over eighty per cent of the men in Class A, and all the remainder in either Class B or Class C. Not a man had to be sent home. Remember that the physical shortcomings of these men were all present before they entered the army and were not acquired in the army. The work done for them made them not only fit to be soldiers, but fit to be citizens. Moreover, it affected them morally exactly as much as physically. They had become utterly dispirited and downcast. After Dr. Goldthwaite was through with them, they were all self-reliant, energetic Americans, vigorous, upstanding, and self-respecting, having lost all trace of either moral or physical crooked back and stooping shoulders.
When we get universal obligatory military training for all our young men, this is what will happen everywhere and the benefit to our people will be incalculable. Such training will minimize the chance of our ever having to go to war and will render it certain that hereafter we shall always be able to defend ourselves instead of trusting to our allies to defend us. Moreover, it will do us even more good as regards the tasks of peace than as regards the tasks of war, for it will turn out every young man far better able to earn his living and far better fitted to be a good citizen.