Knowledge Base
The terms behind the documentaries: wounds and their treatment, disease, exposure, evacuation, supply. Each entry answers what it was, how it worked, and what it meant for the person on the receiving end.
Looking for something specific? Search the archive.
Browse by theme
A
- AmputationThe surgical removal of a limb or part of one, for most of history a choice between losing the limb and losing the patient to bleeding or infection.
- AntisepsisKilling or holding back the germs in a wound and on everything that touches it, the practice that from the late 1860s began to cut deaths from infection after surgery.
B
- BallistaGreek and Roman torsion artillery that threw bolts or stones with the force of twisted sinew rope, explained here by the wounds it left in the people it hit.
- Battlefield evacuationHow the wounded were moved from where they fell to someone who could treat them, and why the distance and the hours often mattered as much as the treatment.
- Blast injuryThe injuries an explosion causes, from the pressure wave itself to flying glass, falling buildings, fire and water. Most victims are hurt by more than one.
C
- Camp feverEpidemic typhus, a louse-borne bacterial disease that followed armies, prisons, ships and refugee columns wherever people were cold, crowded and unable to wash or change clothes.
- CapsariusA Roman soldier who gave first aid to the wounded, named for the case (capsa) of dressings he carried. A trained legionary, not a non-combatant.
- Casualty clearing stationThe British and Commonwealth medical unit of the First World War that sat between the front-line aid posts and the base hospitals, where the wounded were sorted, operated on and sent on.
- Cold-water immersionWhat happens to a body that goes into cold water, in four overlapping stages, and why a life jacket was never enough.
D
E
F
G
H
L
- LigatureTying off a bleeding blood vessel with thread. Described by the Roman writer Celsus in the first century AD, then largely lost from practice for centuries.
- Litter-bearerThe people who carried the wounded off the field by hand. For most of history, how long they took decided how long a wound went untreated.
M
N
O
R
S
- SmallpoxA viral disease of high fever and pustular rash. In 1520 it reached Tenochtitlán, a year after Cortés first entered the city, and killed large numbers of people who had never met it.
- Sympathetic ophthalmiaA rare inflammation that can attack the healthy eye after the other eye is penetrated. Fear of it shaped how many eyes surgeons removed.
T
- Tlameme (porter)The professional carriers of the Nahuatl-speaking world. With no draft animals or carts, central Mexico moved goods, tribute and armies' supplies on human backs, held by a strap across the forehead.
- TourniquetA band tightened around a limb to stop the blood flowing past it. It can save someone bleeding from an arm or leg, and armies argued for over a century about whether it cost more limbs than it saved.
- TrephinationCutting or scraping a hole in the skull of a living person. One of the oldest known surgeries, often done after head injuries, and the bone shows that many patients survived it.
- TriageSorting casualties by how urgently they need care and how likely care is to help, when there are more wounded than hands to treat them.