Even the surgeon thought so. The case was bad but the man seemed so fit. Yet within an hour he was dead.
There was a sergeant, a hardworking, conscientious man, loved by his fellows. A piece of shell got him as he lay asleep at the foot of a dugout. Both feet were shattered. Within ten minutes the surgeons had the man on the operating table, but he was another case of shock. He died while they were working over him.
Shock has other ways of showing itself. A soldier, very badly wounded in the chest and abdomen, was treated in the advanced dressing station, and as he appeared to be normal in every way he was wrapped up and sent in an ambulance to the evacuation hospital. Within a few hours after he arrived, and when he was sleeping quietly, symptoms of shock appeared.
He sat up in bed struggling and tearing at the bandages which covered his chest. “Air!” he gasped. “I must have air! I can not breathe.”
Nurses and doctors surrounded the poor man, trying to alleviate his intense agony. But they knew that this “air hunger,” as it is called, was almost certainly a sign of rapidly approaching death.
The doctors had to find out what caused the conditions. They could not tell by simply observing the shocked men. Too many of them died before much observation could be made.
It did not help the doctors to observe that the blood pressure of such patients went down and that most of the blood in their bodies seemed to disappear. Where did it disappear? Nobody knew. The men’s pulses stopped, their wounds ceased to bleed. Why? Why did they suffer this awful air hunger? What relation had the low blood pressure to the breathing capacity?
There was one way and one only for them to find out. They had to anesthetize a great many guinea pigs, rabbits and other small animals and subject them while unconscious, to conditions as nearly as possible identical with those under which the men had developed wound shock. Perhaps in future they will find another way. At present that is the only way we have. Following experimentation they examined every organ of the wounded animals, analyzed their blood, minutely studied them, with the result that they know, if not all about wound shock, at least something. They know a great deal about the causes and they are on the track of the cure.
They know, for example, that tremendous changes take place in the system following a battle. The men go into action with their hearts beating abnormally hard and high. They are in a state of intense excitement. When they are wounded there occurs a sharp reaction, both mental and physical, partly because of the wound, partly because of bad conditions which often precede going over the top.
Our men behind the line, even when they are exposed to occasional shell fire, lead almost normal lives. They eat and sleep and keep fairly comfortable, even in bad weather. But in the front trenches, it must be admitted, only the sublime courage and devotion of the men enable them to endure their surroundings with cheerful fortitude.