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Rating: 
Summary: An explanation of the perverse way war aids medicine
Review: War's usual outcome is warped, maimed and dead men. 'The Face of Mercy' documents medicine's work to counter the cost for the soldiers and civilians who survive. With narrative by several authors, including Dr. Sherwin Nuland, 'Mercy' begins with an introduction by novelist William Styron. The book straddles the urge to destroy and the desire to heal. 'The body's very tissues reflect this struggle in their constant process of breakdown and repair,' Nuland writes. 'Unfortunately, the ability and impulse to cure have never kept up with the ability and impulse to kill.' The physician's will to save lives so near to battles is a conflict that partially explains why the text is strangely hopeful, given its subject. The large-format photography is matched by lucid writing. The battleground has yielded some of medicine's great accomplishments Ð mass inoculation, antiseptic surgery, blood and plasma transfusions, plastic reconstruction, and huge leaps in heart and lung surgery. Perhaps more importantly for soldiers, war observation established the relationship between speed of treatment and survival; the casualty statistics bear it out. In World War I, the average time between injury and treatment was 10 to 18 hours; surgeons write of removing battle dressings to discover maggots. In Vietnam, the swiftness and valor of helicopter pilots carved the wait to an average of one to two hours. In that conflict less than 2 percent of the hospitalized died. But some things are immutable. The psychological impact of war on doctors and the wounded remains. And as our inventiveness in destruction increases, so does the cost to the mind. One doctor who served in Vietnam writes of 'mud, screams and the terrible smell of death.' Napolean's chief surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, is said to have performed more than 200 amputations during a single day of the doomed expedition into Russia. Undoubtedly, men lived because of his extraordinary effort, but what butchering dreams did he live with afterward? The pictures, largely black and white, range from documentary to editorial. Physicians discovered photography could aid teaching and straightforwardly recorded their methods. But other images are heavy with emotional weight, such as 'A Morning's Work,' a haphazard monument of men's amputated feet and legs, piled outside the door of a Civil War hospital. The effect of war upon civilians is also represented. Survivors in St. Petersburg are shown delivering their bundled dead aboard a child's sled, to a dynamited mass grave. In Leningrad, an estimated million died from starvation, waiting for the war to end. The city's loss was more than the combined military and civilian death toll for both the United States and Great Britain during all of World War II.
Lisa Ashmore
Rating:
Summary: An explanation of the perverse way war aids medicine
Review: War's usual outcome is warped, maimed and dead men. 'The Face of Mercy' documents medicine's work to counter the cost for the soldiers and civilians who survive. With narrative by several authors, including Dr. Sherwin Nuland, 'Mercy' begins with an introduction by novelist William Styron. The book straddles the urge to destroy and the desire to heal. 'The body's very tissues reflect this struggle in their constant process of breakdown and repair,' Nuland writes. 'Unfortunately, the ability and impulse to cure have never kept up with the ability and impulse to kill.' The physician's will to save lives so near to battles is a conflict that partially explains why the text is strangely hopeful, given its subject. The large-format photography is matched by lucid writing. The battleground has yielded some of medicine's great accomplishments à mass inoculation, antiseptic surgery, blood and plasma transfusions, plastic reconstruction, and huge leaps in heart and lung surgery. Perhaps more importantly for soldiers, war observation established the relationship between speed of treatment and survival; the casualty statistics bear it out. In World War I, the average time between injury and treatment was 10 to 18 hours; surgeons write of removing battle dressings to discover maggots. In Vietnam, the swiftness and valor of helicopter pilots carved the wait to an average of one to two hours. In that conflict less than 2 percent of the hospitalized died. But some things are immutable. The psychological impact of war on doctors and the wounded remains. And as our inventiveness in destruction increases, so does the cost to the mind. One doctor who served in Vietnam writes of 'mud, screams and the terrible smell of death.' Napolean's chief surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, is said to have performed more than 200 amputations during a single day of the doomed expedition into Russia. Undoubtedly, men lived because of his extraordinary effort, but what butchering dreams did he live with afterward? The pictures, largely black and white, range from documentary to editorial. Physicians discovered photography could aid teaching and straightforwardly recorded their methods. But other images are heavy with emotional weight, such as 'A Morning's Work,' a haphazard monument of men's amputated feet and legs, piled outside the door of a Civil War hospital. The effect of war upon civilians is also represented. Survivors in St. Petersburg are shown delivering their bundled dead aboard a child's sled, to a dynamited mass grave. In Leningrad, an estimated million died from starvation, waiting for the war to end. The city's loss was more than the combined military and civilian death toll for both the United States and Great Britain during all of World War II.
Lisa Ashmore
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