To carry out this idea reconstruction hospitals were established in large centers of population. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Paul, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, Richmond, Atlanta and New Orleans were sites of these institutions. Each was planned as a 500-bed hospital but with provision for enlargement to 1,000 beds if needed.
These hospitals were not the last step in the return of the wounded soldiers to civil life. When the soldiers were able to take up industrial training, further provision was ready.
Arrangements were made by the Department of Military Orthopedics to care for soldiers, so far as orthopedics (the prevention of deformity) was concerned, continuously until they were returned to civil life. Orthopedic surgeons were attached to the medical force near the firing line and to the different hospitals back to the base orthopedic hospital which was established within one hundred miles of the firing line. In this hospital, in addition to orthopedic surgical care, there was equipment for surgical reconstruction work and "curative workshops" in which men acquired ability to use injured members while doing work interesting and useful in itself. This method supplanted the old and tiresome one of prescribing a set of motions for a man to go through with no other purpose than to re-acquire use of his injured part.
Instructors and examiners for all the troops were furnished by the Department of Military Orthopedic Surgery. A number of older and more experienced surgeons acted as instructors and supervisors for each of the groups into which the army was divided.
A peculiar condition arising from the use of heavy artillery in the war was that called "shell-shock."
The most pathetic wrecks of war were soldiers suffering from shattered nerves. Paris had many of them. They appeared to be normal. But they were human wrecks.
Shell-shock or the aftermath of illness from wounds left them in weakened health, subject to violent heart attacks. Most of them lacked energy and perseverance. They became awkward, like big children. If employment was found for them—for many had large families to support—they quickly lost their jobs through apathy or collapse.
A society in Paris did everything possible to relieve the sufferings of these victims of the war. It operated with the authorization of the French Government under the name "L'Assistance aux Blesses Nerveux de la Guerre."
American hospitals after the war contained many of these cases. Some of the victims became incurably insane.
Besides the noble work done by the great army of American physicians, surgeons and nurses, in caring for soldiers and sailors, a service of scarcely less magnitude was rendered to the civilian populations of France, Belgium and Italy. Tuberculosis in France was a real plague, taking a toll of 80,000 lives every year. American physicians and nurses preached the doctrine of fresh air, care of the teeth and proper food for children. Almost immediately this campaign of sanitation had its effect in a decreasing death-rate from tuberculosis.