Easing Pain on the Western Front: American Nurses of the Great War and the Birth of Modern Nursing Practice

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World War I is widely regarded as the first modern war, driven by fearful new technologies of mechanized combat. The unprecedented carnage rapidly advanced military medicine, transforming the nature of wartime caregiving and paving the way for modern nursing practice.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of American nurses, as well as their Canadian and British counterparts, this powerful study describes WWI nurses’ encounters with devastating new forms of war-related injury –wounds from high-explosive artillery shells, poison gas burns, shell shock, the Spanish Flu–and the interventions and technologies they deployed in treating them, including the Carrel-Dakin method of deep wound irrigation, the Balkan frame, and the Ohio Monovalve gas anesthesia machine.