One of the strange things of this great war is the fact that new, unheard of diseases are developed. It has tended to make common rare diseases and greatly increased those that are usual. Thousands die, having no mark upon their body. Post-mortems held have disclosed in nearly every case that such deaths were caused by shell shock. Bombs from the huge guns dropping near a company of men will often so disarrange organs that death follows quickly. Many who survive lose mind, sight, hearing, speech, and so on. This has become one of the common things of this great war. As a result the warring countries will find themselves confronted with a new and difficult problem when peace comes and normal times are again established. There will be hundreds of thousands to pension and no doubt insane institutions will have to be enlarged. Rest is often a saviour. Men taken away from the fronts, minds blank, in the quiet of home often regain their reason. There is the large percentage that God in his goodness does not see fit to restore that will form an elephantine problem. There will have to be vast pension lists, for these men often have large families.
The way men may be pieced and patched together is one of the finds of the new medical era. It has been discovered that bones in legs and arms practically shot in two can be brought together by means of silver and vanadium steel plates fitted with screws and that the bones will knit and after a period the afflicted can walk almost as satisfactorily as if nothing had happened. Dr. Sherman while in this city this week displayed a steel plate that he worked out and used with marked success in the hospitals of France. These plates are applied in what would seem to be a very simple manner. A man may have a leg or an arm practically shot off. By placing the broken bones together, after a treatment with the Carrel solution to keep down infection, a plate is fitted on either side of the fracture and screws are applied. This holds the two members solidly together and in a few short weeks the bones knit. In time this place is practically the strongest part of the limb. What this means can best be told by explaining that before the discovery, an arm or a leg so badly shattered was simply amputated because this was the only safe and logical way to save the life of the individual. In the olden days gangrene would invariably set in and the patient die within a short time unless amputation was performed promptly following the accident.
Dr. Carrel has gone a long way to eliminate this danger.
Having seen with my own eyes the wonderful results of this treatment during my visits to the American Ambulance and other hospitals in France, I requested Mr. Laurence V. Benet, superintendent of the American Ambulance, to furnish me with an authoritative description of the treatment. The chief purpose of this is to enable medical authorities in this country, particularly those connected with hospitals maintained by iron and steel plants, to gain a reliable outline of the treatment. Dr. Benet, in spite of the fact that he is one of the busiest men in France, kindly agreed to furnish this information. In doing so he accompanied the description with the following letter:
1 Avenue De Camoens
Paris, October 26, 1916.
Mr. Joseph G. Butler, Jr., Youngstown, O.
My dear Mr. Butler:—
In compliance with my request, Dr. Joseph Lawrence, of the American Ambulance, has kindly prepared a short note on the Carrel treatment of wounds, and this I am now enclosing. I trust that you will find it sufficiently explicit for your purposes, and that it will be of use and interest to you.
Now that you are again home I hope that your wonderful trip in France will be less than a mere memory and that the labors of the Industrial Commission will prove, as they should, most valuable to the manufacturers and exporters of the United States. Believe me that it was to me a great privilege as well as a great pleasure to have met you and your distinguished colleagues, and that my only regret is that I was unable to be of greater use to the Commission.