The Wounded

In Army hospitals across the U.S. last week were 7,000 or more men who had been gravely wounded in Korea. Only five years ago, many of them would have been lying under some far-away soil, with only a wooden marker to show that they had lost the last battle. Now, thanks to improvements in the art of medicine--and especially in the logistics of military medicine--nearly all would live. The death rate among the wounded in Korea, said Dr. Richard L. Meiling, the Department of Defense director of Medical Services, was the lowest in the nation's history: little more than i%. World War II's record: 4.5%.

Chief among the reasons for the new saving of life was the speed with which the wounded got to hospitals. As in all wars, litter bearers went in to snatch the wounded from under enemy fire (TIME, Aug. 7); usually there was a jolting ride by jeep or ambulance back from the front lines. But from that point, the Korean war was different.

Wheels & Wings. Developing an idea which it had begun to apply in World War II, the Army Medical Corps put together three mobile surgical hospitals, which traveled from point to point behind the front's hot spots. Better equipped than forward-area hospitals had ever been before, they did major surgery, much of which would once have had to wait weeks or months. Even so, the emphasis was on speed, to get the wounded on the way home as fast as possible. From the mobile units and other field hospitals, within a week after the war's outbreak, helicopters and grasshopper planes flew the most seriously wounded back to evacuation hospitals. Many a man whose life would have been bounced out of him in a long jeep ride over goat trails through the Korean mountains got to an evacuation port in good shape. Just how good was shown by the astonishing record of the evacuation hospital at Pusan: of 18,000 admitted in the first three months of war, only 40 died.

Still the emphasis was on speed. By the end of last week, 11,716 wounded and sick had been moved (mostly by combat cargo plane) from Korea to southern Japan; 9,860 had been flown on to general hospitals near Osaka and Tokyo. But less than half stayed there; most of the rest* went winging across the Pacific. They had a stopover at the Army's Tripler Hospital in Hawaii for a thorough checkup and a couple of nights of vibrationless sleep, and were soon back in the U.S.

Some of the wounded made it all the way from Korea to the eastern U.S. in four or five days. Said Colonel Kenneth A. Brewer, in command of the Tokyo General Hospital: "When wounded men are told that they are going to fly from Tokyo to near their home towns, and will see their families in two or three days, their joy does them almost as much good as all the doctors' medicine."

Doctors & Drugs. Aside from speed in care and transportation, two developments since World War II did much to improve the lot of the wounded. For one thing, the Army has been encouraging specialization in the Medical Corps. Since 1946, hundreds of medics have gone into a three-year residency in such specialties as chest surgery, orthopedics and psychiatry. When the Reds struck in June, many of these medical specialists were rushed to the Far East.

Finally, there were the technical improvements in antibiotics and transfusions. Penicillin, scarce and little understood in World War II, was available in Korea in carload lots, in suspensions which would stay in the system for many life-saving hours. Also on hand were aureomycin, Chloromycetin and Terramycin, often effective where penicillin fails. There was also whole blood, which the Army doctors used more & more in preference to plasma. The shipping and preservation were so efficient (it must be used within 21 days) that Dr. Meiling reported proudly : "Not one unit was lost during September by being outdated."

* About 1,000, best able to stand a sea voyage, were returned by hospital ship when there was no room for them on the planes.

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