Medicine, like technology, advanced considerably during wartime.
A Dalhousie neurologist said doctors at a casino-turned-hospital in France during the First World War rewrote a few textbooks on the brain.
“War forces medicine to be reactive,” said neurologist Mark Sadler.
His predecessor, Gordon Holmes, mapped out the vision centres of the brain from examining so many traumatic head injuries during the First World War.
“They often would get 300 admissions in a single day of seriously injured guys who were only a few miles from the battlefield,” Sadler said.
Horribly understaffed, Holmes and his colleagues tended to the wounded all day, then sat down with the injured at night to conduct vision tests.
“After all the day’s work is done, that’s when they would do their research. These guys had unbelievable stamina, Holmes and his coworkers.”
They examined hundreds of soldiers with gunshot wounds in the head, and mapped out the vision centres of the brain.
“By doing hundreds of cases they slowly built up an understanding of what parts of the brain were responsible for vision,” Sadler said. “And that was new knowledge in the English-speaking world.”
In an earlier conflict, a Japanese doctor came to the same conclusions, but it was never published, Sadler explained.
High-velocity bullets were the reason this kind of specific research could be done.
“If a musket ball hits you in the head then your brain is blasted to bits. Some of these guys had very discreet lesions from a high-velocity injury that doesn’t completely destroy the entire brain,” Sadler said.
“That’s how they were able to look backwards to see what were the deficits these individuals had.”
What Holmes discovered in the First World War still holds water today. Sadler said he teaches medical students to examine the cerebellum is all based on what was learned by Holmes in the First World War.
