World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Hospitals; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
I have almost omitted the nurses from this chapter, because we have
grown so used to loyalty and devotion in women that these qualities
in them do not constitute news. The trained nurses of the Ambulance
Hospital, with half a dozen exceptions, are Americans, with a long
hospital experience at home. During the early months they served with
no remuneration. An allowance of 100 francs a month has now been
established. They reluctantly accepted this, as each was anxious to
continue on the purely voluntary basis. There are also volunteer
auxiliary nurses, who serve as assistants to the trained women. The
entire nursing staff has been efficient and self-sacrificing.
We entered the department where some of the most brilliant surgical
work of the war has been done. It is devoted to those cases where the
face has been damaged. The cabinet is filled with photographs, the wall
is lined with masks, revealing the injury when the wounded man entered,
and then the steps in the restoration of the face to its original
structure and look. There in front of me were the reproductions of
the injury: the chin shot away, the cheeks in shreds, the mouth a
yawning aperture, holes where once was a nose--all the ghastly pranks
of shell-fire tearing away the structure, wiping out the human look.
Masks were there on the wall of man after man who would have gone back
into life a monster, a thing for children to run from, but brought back
inside the human race, restored to the semblance of peasant father,
the face again the recorder of kindly expression. The surgeon and
the dental expert work together on these cases. The success belongs
equally to each of the two men. Between them they make a restoration of
function and of appearance.
In peace days, a city hospital would have only three or four fractures
of the jaw in a year, and they were single fractures. There are
no accidents in ordinary life to produce the hideous results of
shell-fire. So there was no experience to go on. There were no
reference books recording the treatment of wounds to the face caused
by the projectiles of modern warfare. Hideous and unprecedented were
the cases dumped by the hundreds into the American Ambulance. Because
of the pioneer success of this hospital, the number of these cases
has steadily increased. They are classified as "gunshot wounds of the
face, involving the maxillæ, and requiring the intervention of dental
surgery." These are compound fractures of the jaw, nearly always
accompanied by loss of the soft parts of the mouth and chin, sometimes
by the almost complete loss of the face.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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