Partly because the electronic media almost lost one of their stars, we're seeing the kind of information about Iraq that has been scarce before now. I watched "Good Morning America's" report this morning about the injuries sustained by "World News Tonight" co-anchor Bob Woodruff, and it included a look at how sophisticated combat medical procedures have become. One of the biggest advances in helping wounded soldiers stay alive -- begun in Korea and used heavily in Vietnam -- was evacuation from the combat area by helicopter. Those who had wounds too severe to be treated in-country were whisked to the Philippines; some of them were stabilized there and later flown by plane to places like Camp Zama in Japan. But the helicopters were basically just airborne ambulances, with minimal medical care being administered. Soldiers still had to survive the ride to get any real treatment. Today, as ABC showed, there are mobile hospitals that can be parked very near the combat zone with equipment some hospitals here would be happy to have -- it's a far cry from the primitive tents you might be familiar with from "M*A*S*H." And the planes used to evacuate the most severely wounded are similarly equipped. Because of such things, ABC also points out, the casualty rate for troops in Iraq is far lower than in past wars. In World War II, 30 percent of those injured died; the rate was 24 percent in Vietnam, but in Iraq it's only 9 percent.
It's uncomfortable to acknowledge, but many of the great leaps in medicine have come because of war. During the Civil War, two soldiers were lost to disease for every one who died from combat. The later study of the meticulous notes kept by doctors during the war was the start of paying attention to sanitary conditions and post-operative infections; that war also marked the birth of professional nursing. The Spanish-American War brought a cure for Yellow Fever. World War I brought advances in reconstructive surgery and the study of shell-shock, now applied to people in all walks of life and known as post-traumatic stress syndrome. World War II brought the mass production of penicillin (only distributed broadly to the civilian population during the last two years of the war). And on and on.
Imagine the horror if policymakers or those in the healing arts came right out and said something like, "Look, we're falling way behind in medical advances. Let's put thousands of young men in a situation where they have to try to kill each other, and see what we can learn." But that's what we do, really.
