It’s hard, sometimes, to understand what life was like before modern medicine. My paternal grandparents saw three of their five children die before they were three years old due to maladies that today would have been trivially easy to treat. Nowhere is this advance in medicine more apparent than in military circles, where soldiers routinely live through and recover from injuries that would have been fatal a century ago.
Throughout history, this wasn’t the case. I remember reading an apocryphal account of an American Civil War surgeon who bragged about his record on amputations: “40 or 50 percent of my patients survive.” In those days, wounds to limbs were routinely dealt with by amputation. Now we have a gruesome reminder of this, as on the site of the Battle of Waterloo, a site occupied during the battle by British, Dutch, and Prussian forces, archeologists have uncovered the…
