Emergency War Surgery 2014-01-07

“All the circumstances of war surgery thus do violence to civilian
concepts of traumatic surgery. The equality of organizational and
professional management is the first basic difference. The second
is the time lag introduced by the military necessity of evacuation.
The third is the necessity for constant movement of the wounded
man, and the fourth — treatment by a number of different
surgeons at different places instead of by a single surgeon in one
place — is inherent in the third. These are all undesirable factors,
and on the surface they seem to militate against good surgical
care. Indeed, when the over-all circumstances of warfare are
added to them, they appear to make more ideal surgical treatment
impossible. Yet this was not true in the war we have just finished
fighting, nor need it ever be true. Short cuts and measures of
expediency are frequently necessary in military surgery, but
compromises with surgical adequacy are not.”

—Michael E. DeBakey, MD
Presented at Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, October 1946