War and Peace: Medical Advancements During WW1

Technological advances foreshadowed in the American Civil War placed World War I between the machine guns of the trenches and the antiquated firing lines and cavalry charges of earlier European conflicts. In response to the horrifying casualty numbers, combatants were forced to quickly adapt in order to minimize their battlefield losses from disease and bullets.

According to Andrew Burtch, director of research at the Canada War Museum, the first and most direct horror that soldiers faced was due to the weapons used. The Canadian Press quotes him:

The weaponry that's used in the First World War in great numbers, which cause the most horrible injuries, is the concentration of artillery shells that were dropped on positions, doing terrible things to human bodies through high-explosive blasts, shell fragments and shrapnel.
So the actual shock of seeing and trying to cope with these injuries poses a whole litany of medical challenges, not least of which is where to start, how to stop the bleeding, how to manage infection, how to keep people from dying of shock.

A quick development early on in the war was the standardized helmet, given in response to the large amount of head wounds.
The terrible muddy conditions, most famously at Passchendaele, created ideal conditions for infection-causing bacteria. Sometimes, the muddy water that soldiers stood in could by itself create infection in the form of "trench foot".

World War I saw the first sophisticated casualty line. Soldiers were first taken to casualty stations, normally tents close to the front, then transported by train to a traditional hospital. This process could take as little as 24 hours, a huge improvement for medical care, since quicker medical responses prove more effective.

A response that was developed to aid injured soldiers was direct blood transfusions, which tripled the survival rate of those who were injured in the torso. Captain Oswald Robertson of the US Medical Corps demonstrated that blood could be stored in advance, creating the first concept of the blood bank.
Hugh Owen Thomas of Britain developed a tool called the Thomas splint that was used on broken legs. It dropped the percentage of soldiers who died of broken femur bones from 80% at the beginning of the war to only 20% by 1916.
Marie Curie, Nobel Prize, promoted another recent medical tool, the portable X-ray. These machines were stored in cars so that they could be moved around the battlefield, helping doctors with diagnoses.
The wounded soldiers who recovered but had bodily disfigurements as a result of their injuries were equipped with more advanced prosthetics and cosmetic surgeries. Dr. Gilles of Britain developed a form of grafting that would move tissue and skin from one area of the body to another to repair damage.
Finally, although not unique to World War I, many soldiers came back from the battle lines with "shell shock", known today as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Caused by the trauma of the front, PTSD affected soldiers for decades after the wars' end, never completely disappearing. The post-WWI era was the first time where shell shock would be treated with primitive methods, like electric shocks. Even if shell shock was not successfully treated, further study that continues today surged.

These innovations, particularly of wound treatment, still apply today. Modified versions of World War I treatments are still used to treat and clean some types of injuries, while current battlefield medicine is an extension on many ideas about health developed during the war.

Sources:
Saleyha Ahsan, "How did WW1 change the way we treat war injuries today?," BBC Guides, http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zs3wpv4
Sheryl Ubelacker, 9-22-2014, "How First World War medical advances still benefit patients today," CTV News, http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/how-first-world-war-medical-advances-still-benefit-patients-today-1.2017970
"War and medicine," London Science Museum, http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/themes/war.aspx