Medical Aid In Ernest Hemingway's Shell Shock During World War One

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In the Great War, medical aid became a major key to winning the war and saving people’s lives from the countless difficulties. Soldiers were shot, infected, and were prone to serious diseases. Because of these horrendous aspects, medical aid had to adapt quickly to the new-age warfare. Medical aid in World War I improved trauma aid because of the injuries and all the adjustments doctors had to fabricate. Ernest Hemingway experienced this first hand as an ambulance driver during the war. World War I was the first major war fought between countries around the world. The war began on July 28th, 1914. There was one overarching reason that caused the outbreak of the war. It was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28th, 1914 (Strachan). …show more content…
Shell shock was a major psychological problem during the first war. It resulted from constant bombings and explosion from the war. The symptoms of shell shock were horrid. In the article “Shell Shock during World War One”, the author Professor Joanna Bourke, concurs , “Symptoms ranged from uncontrollable diarrhoea to unrelenting anxiety” (Bourke). Soldiers suffered from these without any sort of cure. It caused such a psychological impact on soldiers that over eighty percent of patients were not able to return to war (Bourke). Soldiers who had shell shock were taken to hospitals or asylums. At each individual place, treatment was different for each soldier. Every patient was different because each had a different traumatizing experience. In the article “Wounding in World War One”, written by medical historian Julie Anderson, Anderson exclaims, “A final cure often took a long time and consisted of hours of therapy, rest and recuperation” (Anderson). Today, shell shock is referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder and is treated the same way with but with the addition of medications. Without the attention shellshock received, during World War I, medical aid would not have improved to what it had come to during the

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