Cured and well-fed for the war

The aim of the medical care was to release “cured” soldiers as quickly as possible. The hospitals soon turned into “health factories” based on the ideas of the physiologist Arnold Durig. Medical and administrative procedures followed a strict organisational and time management plan. Operations had to be completed as quickly as possible. Soldiers with simple bullet wounds or patients with infectious diseases like cholera or dysentery could indeed be released relatively healthy after a short period of treatment to make up for the enormous loss of life in the first months of the war.

Pictures at the time suggest that the soldiers were deliberately well-fed so that they could be sent back to the front. As the war progressed this became increasingly difficult to do, however. The head of the University Children’s Hospital Clemens Pirquet therefore developed a “rational food plan”, originally with the aim of providing sufficient nourishment as the supply situation worsened for “war children”. Pirquet’s nutritional system was based on the controversial thesis that fat could be more or less completely replaced by sugar and carbohydrates. The system was used from 1917 not only in children’s hospitals but also in military facilities.

The soldiers who survived were normally transferred to hospitals in their homelands after a few weeks of treatment – as can be seen, for example, from the medical record of Heinrich Schäffer, 30 years old, reserve officer, 52nd Infantry Regiment, 9th Company, from Hidas, Komitat Boronjo, Hungary. After being admitted to the 1st Surgical University Clinic on 14 December 1914 with a bullet wound in the right thigh and frostbite on the right foot, he was transferred “cured” on 23 April 1915 to the Red Cross hospital in Dombóvár. Another patient, Josef Skocila, born 1895 in Bistritz am Hostein (Bystřice pod Hostýnem), infantryman, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Company, was admitted to General Hospital I on 6 June 1915 with a bullet wound in the back. He had been wounded by shrapnel near Jaroslav, rescued from the field by stretcher bearers and bandaged in a field hospital. He was admitted to hospital in Jaroslav and Neusandez and transferred from there to Vienna. The x rays revealed that the bullet entered near the right hip bone and exited in the “sata region”, no projectile in the pelvic girdle and no major factures. He was released as “cured” on 19 June 1915.

Translation: Nick Somers