AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT UNIVERSITY OF GRENOBLE
In its treatment of patients in the military hospitals, the Medical Department of the Army went beyond the realm of pure surgery and medication in order to reconstruct physically and mentally, when necessary, the men left disabled by the war. To this end it enlarged its Sanitary Corps to include persons skilled in physical and occupational reconstruction. The plan permitted the employment by the Corps of civilian women, who, after putting on the distinctive blue uniform adopted for them, were known as reconstruction aides. These women were skilled in two branches of therapy—occupational therapy (the teaching of new occupations to invalids as a curative measure) and physiotherapy (including baths of various sorts, massage, heat and electric treatments, and gymnastics). Most of the general hospitals were fitted with workshops, gymnasiums, physiotherapy departments, and educational buildings. An elementary school system was inaugurated at the general hospitals, and several thousand illiterate patients were taught to read and write during their convalescence. Organized recreational activities were conducted at each general hospital engaging in reconstruction. Outdoor games, setting-up exercises and other gymnastic exercises, military drills, and organized play of many sorts vied with concerts, plays, boxing matches, and other amusements for the interest of the convalescents. One important work of the physiotherapists was to teach men with amputated limbs how to dress, feed, and otherwise care for themselves, and how to use the artificial legs or arms which the Government supplied to them. Nineteen former training camps were converted into convalescent centers operated by the Medical Department. To these places the general hospitals sent 50,000 convalescent soldiers to be finally hardened by curative work and play for their reëntrance into civilian life.
Photo by Signal Corps
A. E. F. SOLDIERS AS COMEDIANS
Photo by Signal Corps
JUDGING COMEDY HORSE AT 4TH ARMY HORSE SHOW
After patients were finally discharged from the Army and from the army hospitals, the Government by no means washed its hands of them. Congress had set up three great new federal agencies looking to the welfare of the discharged soldier. One of these was the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, which, in addition to offering low-priced life insurance policies of the standard sorts to all ex-service men, determined, granted, and paid the monthly allowances given by the Government to all Americans disabled by service in the uniform during the World War. Then, too, Congress had greatly enlarged the function of the old Public Health Service by making it responsible for the medical care of all ex-service men discharged from the Army or Navy and from the military hospitals but still needing attention on account of disabilities incurred during the war. Finally, Congress established by law the Federal Board for Vocational Education, an act which outdid in gratitude and generosity anything which the American Government had ever before offered to disabled war veterans.
After the Public Health Service began expanding its facilities for the care of disabled veterans, the Medical Department adopted the policy of discharging its patients rapidly and turning them over to the Public Health Service. Not only were those two classes of war victims requiring extended medical treatment—the mental and nervous cases and those suffering with tuberculosis—so treated, but men still suffering from wounds and sometimes requiring major operations and long periods for convalescence thereafter were released from the Army and committed to the ministrations of the Public Health Service. The immediate result of such a transfer was to entitle the disabled soldier to receive from the Government his disability allowance, which could be paid only after a man’s discharge from the military service, and it often allowed him to secure medical care in the vicinity of his own home. Another important result was that, during 1920, although thousands of the victims of the war still required constant medical attention, the Medical Service of the Army rapidly contracted toward its prewar proportions, with a consequent expansion of the branch of the Public Health Service which dealt with disabled veterans.