Crimean War Research Paper

There was major progress in terms of medical treatment, nursing, and surgery during the Crimean War, the American Civil War and World War One. Still, these improvements were not capable to combat efficiently enough the epidemics that manifested themselves during these conflicts as well as the serious injuries that resulted from the development of increasingly lethal weapons.

The Crimean War was fought from September 14, 1854 to July 12, 1856 between France, Great Britain, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Poor medical care and living conditions, made the need for improvement vital. As said by historian Fielding Garrison, “Of all recorded wars, the Crimean has perhaps the greatest teaching value for military medicine” because the largest

Improvements during the time period include the invention of the X-ray, Typhoid immunization, female nursing corps, automobile ambulances, blood transfusions, psychiatry, anesthesia, and the introduction of aviation medicine. The detection of the X-ray in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen opened the modern era of technological medicine. The use of X-rays in hospitals and even on the battlefields of World War I for diagnostic purposes was one of the most rapid disseminations of a new medical technique. Enteric, or Typhoid, fever was spread by ingestion of faecally contaminated food or water and caused many deaths and much debility during the Great War period, particularly as trench life was necessarily associated with poor hygiene and lack of sanitation.The vermin and flies that were part of trench life ensured that typhoid fever remained a common affliction of WW1 soldiers.Because of the Typhoid vaccine, however, the number of typhoid cases was reduced from 20,000 in the Spanish-American War of 1898 to just 1,500 in World War