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What was medicine like during World War One?
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What was medicine like during World War One?
Last modified: Sunday, 31 May 2026, 4:29 PM
What was medicine like during WW1
How were injured soldiers treated?
Red Cross nurses by Fabien Fabiano for French magazine 'La Baionette', 1915The war was a time of change for the treatment of injuries and illness.
Injured and sick soldiers needed to be treated quickly so they could go back to fighting as soon as possible.
Casualty stations were set up near battlefields, some by the Red Cross.
Women on the front line
Female volunteers worked as nurses and drove ambulances.
Most worked 14-hour days and sometimes even longer when there were lots of injured soldiers.
Injuries and illnesses
Soldiers not only took injuries in battle. They also suffered from illnesses and diseases caused by the dreadful conditions in the trenches.
Trench fever was caused by body lice
It made soldiers suffer from fever, headaches, aching muscles and skin sores. It was painful and took around twelve weeks to recover.
Poisonous gas was used as a weapon
During the First World War, poison gas was used as a weapon.
It was very dangerous, so soldiers wore gas masks to protect themselves.
Many soldiers were harmed by gas attacks and some had health problems for the rest of their lives.
The poet Wilfred Owen wrote about a gas attack in his famous poem Dulce et Decorum Est.
Shell shock was a mental illness
The constant noise of explosions and guns was scary. Some soldiers stopped being able to follow commands. Officers and doctors thought the soldiers were weak. Some were sent to hospital. Others had to carry on fighting.
Trench foot was caused by standing in water and mud
In some cases, soldiers' socks started to grow on to their feet. In severe cases, soldiers had to have their feet or legs amputated (cut off).
What is triage?
The Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) was set up to care for British troops.
It used a special system called 'triage' where sick soldiers were put into one of three possible groups:
Medical Advances
Left: an X-ray showing a bullet in the body. Right: blood transfusion apparatus, 1914-1918.During World War One, X-ray machines helped doctors see where bullets were inside a soldier’s body. This made it easier for surgeons to carry out operations and save lives.
Doctors also learned how to store blood safely. This meant they could give blood transfusions to injured soldiers who had lost a lot of blood.
Before these medical advances, many soldiers with serious burns, injuries, or illnesses would not have survived. Thanks to new treatments, many more lives were saved.
What was Spanish Flu?
In March 1918, a dangerous illness called Spanish Flu began to spread around the world. It infected about one in every three people and became one of the deadliest diseases in history.
The illness became known as Spanish Flu because newspapers in Spain were free to report on it. During the war, many other countries limited what newspapers could write about, so people heard more news about the flu from Spain than anywhere else.
As a result, the disease became known as Spanish Flu, even though it did not start in Spain.
What was the cause?
At first, some people thought the illness was caused by poison gas. Today, we know it started in animals and birds before spreading to people.
The flu travelled around the world on ships that were carrying goods between different countries.
Soldiers lived very close together in camps and trenches, which made it easy for the illness to spread from one person to another.
How did the world change?
40-50 million people died from Spanish flu. This was many more people than the war itself.
How were soldiers cared for after the war had ended?
When the war ended, soldiers returned home and went back to normal life. Some found this easier because they had not been badly injured during the war. For others, life was much more difficult.
Some soldiers came home with serious injuries, such as losing a limb, having breathing problems, or losing their sight.
Many soldiers also suffered from a condition called shell shock. Today, we know this as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the time, people did not fully understand it, and some wrongly thought it meant a soldier was being weak or afraid.
