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rachelmanija Mar. 10th, 2018 10:53 am)
rachelmanija Mar. 10th, 2018 10:53 am)The Curse of Nonfiction strikes again: fascinating topic, dry book.
An account of pioneering burn surgeon Archibald McIndoe and The Guinea Pig Club, a group of badly burned WWII airmen who he treated in a small hospital in England. McIndoe not only revolutionized techniques for treating and reconstructing burn injuries, he also helped the men integrate into the community. (Link goes to Wikipedia; good article, no gruesome photos.) I got interested in this after reading Richard Hilary's memoir, The Last Enemy.
It’s a really interesting story, but the book was a bit of a slog that periodically came to life in the handful of first-person accounts by the airmen themselves. It also benefited from both photos (not gruesome IMO – they’re of the men, not of the burns themselves - though some are startling/unsettling as they show some stages of reconstruction. By which I mostly mean this really cool technique to grow new flesh by attaching the wounded area to an unwounded area (which still has a blood supply, etc) and getting it to grow between them. So you end up with this sort of tube-like elephant's trunk growing from your nose or ear to your arm for a period of months, from which the surgeon would eventually construct your new nose or ear. You see why being able to go to the pub and not get stared at was such a blessing. ). Also cartoons by a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
I did appreciate the historical background. For instance, it explains that one reason McIndoe's techniques were revolutionary was that previous to WWII, anyone burned as badly as many of these men would have died within hours or days, and so reconstructive surgery for those sorts of injuries was a moot point. This was the period when doctors were figuring out how to treat shock, which meant that all of a sudden, people were surviving with wounds that previously would have killed them. And then doctors had to figure out what to do to help them then. (Incidentally, the issue of what to do with people with previously non-survivable injuries is still ongoing, and there have been conceptual breakthroughs in how to treat shock/blood loss just in the last ten years - also due to war. It's the quintessential mixed blessing.)
There’s also a very informative explanation of why so many men got burned the way they did (placement of the fuel tank) and why that was such a difficult issue to solve, as among other problems a lot of the possible solutions would have made the planes heavier and so slower and less agile, which then would make them more likely to be hit in the first place.
However, I was primarily interested in the experience of the airmen and those parts were good, but the rest of the book was pretty textbook-y. I also would have liked to know more about what their lives were like after they left the hospital.
I see now that another member of the Guinea Pig Club wrote a memoir. I’m thinking that’s what I actually want to read.
An account of pioneering burn surgeon Archibald McIndoe and The Guinea Pig Club, a group of badly burned WWII airmen who he treated in a small hospital in England. McIndoe not only revolutionized techniques for treating and reconstructing burn injuries, he also helped the men integrate into the community. (Link goes to Wikipedia; good article, no gruesome photos.) I got interested in this after reading Richard Hilary's memoir, The Last Enemy.
It’s a really interesting story, but the book was a bit of a slog that periodically came to life in the handful of first-person accounts by the airmen themselves. It also benefited from both photos (not gruesome IMO – they’re of the men, not of the burns themselves - though some are startling/unsettling as they show some stages of reconstruction. By which I mostly mean this really cool technique to grow new flesh by attaching the wounded area to an unwounded area (which still has a blood supply, etc) and getting it to grow between them. So you end up with this sort of tube-like elephant's trunk growing from your nose or ear to your arm for a period of months, from which the surgeon would eventually construct your new nose or ear. You see why being able to go to the pub and not get stared at was such a blessing. ). Also cartoons by a member of the Guinea Pig Club.
I did appreciate the historical background. For instance, it explains that one reason McIndoe's techniques were revolutionary was that previous to WWII, anyone burned as badly as many of these men would have died within hours or days, and so reconstructive surgery for those sorts of injuries was a moot point. This was the period when doctors were figuring out how to treat shock, which meant that all of a sudden, people were surviving with wounds that previously would have killed them. And then doctors had to figure out what to do to help them then. (Incidentally, the issue of what to do with people with previously non-survivable injuries is still ongoing, and there have been conceptual breakthroughs in how to treat shock/blood loss just in the last ten years - also due to war. It's the quintessential mixed blessing.)
There’s also a very informative explanation of why so many men got burned the way they did (placement of the fuel tank) and why that was such a difficult issue to solve, as among other problems a lot of the possible solutions would have made the planes heavier and so slower and less agile, which then would make them more likely to be hit in the first place.
However, I was primarily interested in the experience of the airmen and those parts were good, but the rest of the book was pretty textbook-y. I also would have liked to know more about what their lives were like after they left the hospital.
I see now that another member of the Guinea Pig Club wrote a memoir. I’m thinking that’s what I actually want to read.
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God I love (by which I mean find deeply fascinating) this element when it comes to medicine/etc. Because it's really so true and so applicable/important, and so poorly understood often by mainstream ideas about medicine.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Health/jfk-baby-death-50-years-ago-today-sparked/story?id=19883153
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/health/a-kennedy-babys-life-and-death.html
And one of the big scandals surrounding Walter Reed is that a lot of young men are now being medically discharged from the military after being wounded in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and successfully treated, but now they're going to need lifelong therapy and follow-up and the VA just absolutely isn't equipped to do that. The directive to preserve life no matter what often runs right into the brick wall of how good the quality of life is going to be for those people later -- which in the vicious US health insurance system means who's going to pay for it.
(couldn't find the specific Walter Reed article I was thinking of but this is a good example https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/us/veterans-chemical-burns-expanded-military-doctors-knowledge-but-his-care-faltered.html)
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Burns remain pretty horrific depending on how bad they are but treatment has gotten really good if the damage is serious but primarily cosmetic. A classmate at Antioch had third degree scald burns on much of her face and neck from a childhood accident, and she had to literally point out the areas at five inches away before I could even tell where they were.
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Weirdly, despite the obligatory murder mystery and the changed names and the fact that my post is mostly about another character, you can get a very good idea of the Guinea Pig Club from the third-series Foyle's War episode "Enemy Fire." I think Anthony Horowitz really just wanted to write a short play about McIndoe, so he barely filed off the serial numbers and had the series regulars wander through.
I see now that another member of the Guinea Pig Club wrote a memoir. I’m thinking that’s what I actually want to read.
I have not read them all myself, but the last time I went looking, there were a surprising number of Guinea Pig memoirs: it's practically a sub-genre, which I think is great.
This is a sight-unseen recommendation, but Liz Byrski's In Love and War looks as though it might track some of the airmen's later lives.
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Also someone wrote AN OPERA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw5x0mFDqA0
(Which honestly just reminds me of that bit in the Vonnegut book where someone earnestly advises the lovers in Aida at the end, "You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing.")
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