4 ms·
The entire field of plastic and reconstructive surgery basically came out of The Great War.
by angersock 9y ago
The entire field of plastic and reconstructive surgery basically came out of The Great War.
- Mz 9y agoI read or heard somewhere that a lot of modern brain surgery techniques came out of Vietnam. Thanks to the basically new invention of military helicopters, they could rapidly medivac people who previously would have just died in the field with no hope of survival. They had people out cold with dirt in their hair, etc, and they began doing things like going in through the mouth which was cleaner, had less hard structures between it and the brain than the scalp and generally healed up better. I also saw a video, probably a TED talk, by a guy who was asked by the military to revolutionize prostheses for military members who had lost an arm. He initially said that their ambitious goal for improved functionality could not be done. They inundated him with stats on people who had lost an arm serving their country. Their punchline was the number of soldiers who had lost both arms. At that point he caved and accepted this crazy sounding, "impossible" task which led to radical improvements in the tech, iirc.
- pchristensen 9y agoProbably Dean Kamen: https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthetic_arm https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthet... possibly https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_kuiken_a_prosthetic_arm_that_feels https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_kuiken_a_prosthetic_arm_that_...
- dvtv75 9y agoI recall reading that the peak of medicine under the Roman Empire was not reached again until The Great War. Quite interesting, and it makes me wonder how far we would have come had the Roman Empire not fallen.