How the First World War Gave Medicine a New Body of Evidence

Its casualties brought a new understanding of human fragility and wholeness

After the war, an injured French soldier awaits fitting of a reconstructive mask by Anna Coleman Ladd of the American Red Cross. Photo: American Red Cross/Library of Congress

By Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers

Centenary celebrations remind us that the First World War, the War to End All Wars, ended 100 years ago. But it did not. It staggered on in much of Europe, it lingered in the broken psyches of soldiers returning home. For some historians, the Great War and the Second World War together form an ‘age of catastrophe’ or even one single war with a long break. The First World War also inaugurated a profound change beneath politics, in a realm largely hidden from journalism or military and political history. The Great War remade the human body itself.

The doctors who identified this new human body saw an organism that organises itself, regulates itself, integrates itself, yet was extremely brittle. It was marked by fragility buried under the skin. It shattered easily, even worked against itself. The great number of injured and maimed bodies enabled doctors to create new kinds of medicine, physiology and psychiatry. In doing so, they also helped to foster a new language of politics and the welfare state.

Hints of this new conception of the body were present before the war, but when tens of thousands of soldiers…