Medicine in the Crimean War

The Crimean war proved to be an extremely inhospitable place for the British Military, especially in the winter of 1854-5. The winter, even by Russian standards was extremely cold and harsh, this combined with the fact that due to a supply shortage, men were left without warm winter clothing and medicine meant that staying healthy was extremely difficult.

Over the course of the war, it is thought that 22,000 men were injured or killed in battle, but only 3754 actually died in battle, the others died because of the poor medical services that they received. Scurvy was a huge issue for example, around 85% of the men that were admitted into hospitals in the war had scurvy. In fact conditions were so horrendously awful, that one had a better chance of survival being in the Charge of the Light Brigade than being in a British hospital. Common sights in hospitals were men slowly dying of exposure t the harsh winter conditions, infections and blood loss.

To combat this, the British Government sent Florence Nightingale to head the introduction of female nurses into the war and to improve hospital conditions.

It was around this time that huge medical improvements were being made, the link between hygiene and germs had just been discovered, and as a response antiseptic was being used for the first time to help cleanse wounds and surgical treatment. Carbolic

acid was a key antiseptic that had come into wide usage, it would be sprayed on patients wounds and on medical instruments, supposedly in a Newcastle Hospital, this reduce infection related deaths by 56%.

Despite these advances though, a sheer lack of effective management and resources lead to appalling conditions, as demonstrated by this account by an Assistant Surgeon in the Crimea (Dr Wrench) - 'There were no beds or proper bedding in the hospital in Balaclava. Patients had to lye in their dirty clothes on the hospital floor. A hurricane had blown out all of the windows in the hospital. This allowed rain to be blown onto the patients of the hospital. Wounds were infected by the heat and dust, by shortage of water and lack of proper care, and grew more and more painful. Foul exhalations contaminated the air, in spite of the praiseworthy attempts of the authorities to keep hospital areas in a sanitary condition'. To modern ears this sounds horrific, and it must have been much the same for the medical staff who had to work in these conditions, but mostly by the brave men who died there.

However the French and Russian treatment was not much better, they suffered from much the same systemic problems as the British did, partly due to a lack of understanding, and partly down to a sheer lack of medical equipment. Ambulances were notoriously overcrowded and helped spread a typhus epidemic, which affect some 90% of all patients carried by Ambulance.

The war did however lead to medical reform, it was made clear that having more men die from disease than from the enemy was simple unacceptable. Better treatment was given to soldiers in future wars, but the most clear cut example of an improvement is the foundation of the Red Cross by Henry Durant, who was inspired to improve medical care for soldiers based on his experiences of the Crimean -  a charity that still runs today.