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Showing posts tagged wwii
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When my mom was little, her mother would tell her not to scratch her sister, because her sister might get blood poisoning and die.
Of course, this only encouraged her.
It’s easy to forget how recently minor wounds could kill someone.
But then you see this.
In a UK hospital, new drug “penicillin” being used on a human for 1st time: policeman Alex Armstrong, dying from infected rose-bush scratch.
— WW2 Tweets from 1941 (@RealTimeWWII) February 11, 2013And this.
Penicillin’s effects on humans unknown- Armstrong chosen because infected scratch is certainly fatal; body’s covered in bacterial abscesses.
— WW2 Tweets from 1941 (@RealTimeWWII) February 11, 2013The man’s name was actually Albert Alexander; I’m not sure where “Alex Armstrong” came from. He was a cop, but the day he got hurt, he hadn’t done anything more dangerous than trimming the rosebushes. A thorn scratched his skin. Two months later, he’d lost an eye to the weeping bacterial abscesses that covered his head and body. Staph and strep weren’t drug-resistant yet. The first injections made an immediate improvement. Sadly, there wasn’t enough of the experimental drug, and a month later, Reserve Constable Alexander was dead.
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“Three nurses carry babies cocooned in baby gas respirators down the corridor of a London hospital during a gas drill. Note the carrying handle on the respirator used to carry the baby by the nurse in the foreground.” London, 1940.
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”It was wonderful. I loved doing it because it was exciting, because the waiting on the aerodrome was nothing more than the waiting before a football games or before going in to bat. But then always going back and always getting away with it… each time it gets worse… it whispers to you that you are almost certain to buy it sooner or later, and that when you do… you will be just a charred corpse… black… twisted and brittle.
As a followup to that last post, Roald Dahl talks about his experience in the RAF, as quoted in A Summer Bright and Terrible.
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Don’t read the explanation yet. Just look at the picture for a bit.
This is the first Norman Rockwell painting that’s ever made me tear up a bit. It’s sentimental, yes, but there’s a brutal honesty there, despite the smile.
Back to Civvies, Norman Rockwell, The Saturday Evening Post, December 15, 1945
Back to Civvies shows a World War II Flying Fortress pilot in the bedroom where he grew up. Rockwell chose props that say a lot about the flyer’s life both before and after he went to war. Even his name—-Lt. A. H. Becktoft—-is on the duffel bag on the floor. The insignia on the uniform jacket reveals that he served with distinction. The blue and yellow ribbon with the tiny oak leaf cluster indicates that he received the Air Medal twice. -
Winston’s shell. Designer Graham demostrates Winston Churchill’s personal pressure chamber, created to enable him to make high-altitude flights safely. In: Life, 10 Feb 1947.
To protect the precious bulk of Winston Churchill in wartime a special one-man pressure chamber was built for the personal plane which carried him many times across the Atlantic and to Casablanca, Moscow and Yalta. Churchill was warned by his doctors that it was dangerous for a man of his age and physical condition to fly above 8,000 feet. The solution was a pressure chamber complete with ash trays, telephone and an air-circulation system good enough to prevent smoke from the ubiquitous cigar from fogging the atmosphere.
I kind of want this as a writing chamber. Although I don’t smoke cigars.
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Samurai Knitter: A military moment.
In which an enthusiastic young man learns a valuable lesson on keeping his mouth shut.
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I just had to pause Foyle’s War to look up saline baths in the treatment of burns.
It’s a plot point in this episode, but mostly I thought it was cool.
I had an abrasion on my foot once that healed remarkably quickly after I waded into the Pacific. (That was way up north, though, where the water’s a good deal cleaner than it is here in LA.)
Military medicine - ‘A Saline Bath’, 1943 - Wellcome Collection
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