Doctor. This is my hobby. I love the educational fact that we are trying to keep this alive. I try to make it enjoyable and let them know how important it is to understand what the history was. Is basically a mobile emergency room. You have heard of mash, mobile Army Surgical hospital. This is a mobile emergency room. Like any emergency room we assess, treat, stabilize, and we get them out. Asare basically located close to the front lines as possible. Weve got to be, because we have troopers coming in here in pretty bad shape. The battalion aid station operates just behind the lines. Corpsman trained demonstrates his value, taking the many jobs physicians would have to perform, freeing the doctors to give attention to more serious cases. The medics, the real heroes of the war, are triaging gunshots with mortar rounds going all over the place. They will triage in the field. They come to one guy with a cut on his shoulder and say put a bandage on you and get to the rear. The second guy has both legs blown off, have his chest is gone, this guy is going to die and there is nothing on gods green earth that is going to save that guy. They are going to get some lipstick that they got from their girlfriend in london and fatal, let him die in peace, and go find someone they can actually save in london, give him as much morphine as they could spare, let him die in peace, and go find somebody they could save. This is the first job of the medic. Man is hits and an eight man gets to his side. Helping the first spurt of blood is important. Giving a shot of morphine. They have another guy you come to. He has really clammy skin, not answering questions well, this guy is going into shock and not much long to go to give him medical attention. And then i have to triage the triage. I have to decide which one is the most critical and which one i can save. Remember, these guys are coming in in shock, the Blood Pressure is low, if we dont get the Blood Pressure up they are going to die or go into renal failure. That is a death sentence because there is no dialysis. One of the main reasons we saved so many lives was because of the plasma. The european theater of operation blood bank held the plasma. The plasma is the fluid component of blood with red and f. Ite cells spun of it is a volume expander and increases intravascular volume. We get the iv started, get that going, and hopefully get their Blood Pressure up and stabilize them to the point where we can call transportation and get them out. The second part of the war, believe it or not, they came up plasma. Ezedried it would look like cornstarch. They would mix it with distilled water and that would reconstitute it. And there would be your volume expander. That is what we would give. Someone asked, why do surgery do you do surgery . No, i dont do surgery. I dont have general anesthesia equipment, and number two i cant take time to do that. If i spend an hour and i have five or six troopers out here the main thing that i have been here, the main quality of this battalion aid station worth their weight in gold is a seasoned medic. A seasoned medic can start the ivs while i am working out here. They can advise the doctor. Remember, some of these docs, how much combat experience do they have . Unless they did their residency in the inner cities of detroit, not much. Seasoned medics were great. Just like today with the residents and the interns, how much they rely on the seasoned nurses to help them out. We got the guys here. We have them assessed. We stabilize them. And we call them on my cell phone over here. This is an e. A. Phone. Ell batteries. It has a generator that i can twist on that generates a charge. This can go to the phone on the opposite end. That will ring it. Then i will toggle to talk and untoggle to listen. Santa have someone with a really bad chest wound that needed surgery two hours ago. I will call and say we need someone here now, we need to get them into surgery, we better get a chest cutter because he aint got much longer. So we can get transportation to get him from here. From here they would go to a collecting station. At the collecting station what they would do is reassess the patient and decide this guy needs to go to the Field Hospital. This guy has too many vascular issues, lets get him back to england. This guy we can get him to the rear to recover back there. Medical officers, expert in judging the conditions of andalties, saw the patients determine the position. Patients needing specialized surgery tend the Field Hospital set up close by. The great majority of operations are for perforating abdominal wounds and sucking wounds of the chest, like this one. One thing about the battalion aid station, every battalion aid station is different. We all have the same purpose, the same concept, but everything you can have a piece of canvas over a ditch and call aid, but the main thing is to be as close to the front lines as possible and be and to get these guys in treated. 80 of the people who left this place survived. I. In world war i think the main reason was because of the volume expanders, the plasma and penicillin. Do i have time to go over all of the antibiotics that we had back then . We had penicillin and so without seeing. If you had a sulfur allergy you were out of luck. Penicillin was discovered in england. The first guy who discovered it was like, what the heck is this . And discovered it i think in 1938. England was concerned in 1940 about one thing. That was not being taken over by the germans. They brought the penicillin to the United States and found the mold, and then had a developing curve penicillin. If i had a patient with a dirty wound i would wash it out the best i could come and give them penicillin, put a loose dressing on it, stabilize it and call for transportation. Get out of my yard. No doctor in their right mind wants to be a Battalion Surgeon. I dont want to be here. I want to be in an english hospital with goodlooking nurses and a warm bed. I dont want to be 200 yards from the front line with bullets going overhead and shooting short rounds at me from the rear, but this is my job. If i didnt do my job people would die. The battalionart, surgeons did not jump into combat. They let establish a front. They would be brought in by ship. The more i read the more doctors did jump. There was one do with thec third battalion of the 506 named dr. Stanley morgan, captain morgan. He actually did jump into normandy on june 5. He immediately sprained his ankle and was immediately captured by the germans. Where do you think they put him . In a prisoner of war camp . Ell no they put him to work. He said he worked alongside the germans, couldnt understand a thing they said, but it was the same technique. Where did we learn most of our technique from . It was from the germans. The first part of the war we had a hard time getting surgical instruments. Where were they made . Germany. What is a Battalion Surgeon . I have four years of medical school, i have one year of general medical internship, and then i am a licensed physician. There goes my deferment. Becauseoiding the draft they did not want a medical student. They wanted a doctor. Then i was able to draft, otherwise i would enlist. Enlist in the airborne, they pushed me out of the airplane five times screaming all the way. Then i went on to be part of the 326 hospital corps. This was the hospital corps attached to the 101st. Were pretty docs green when they came in. They had seasoned docs, sure, but many were green and that is why it was important to have seasoned medics that would help us out immensely. Come through and look around. The medical cabinets, i try to have the things i will use. The Blood Pressure cups, you are saying this is a Blood Pressure cup in world war ii. It works. A column ofh mercury and is accurate. You have the laws of gravity and the density of mercury, those things never change. However, how am i going to hear Blood Pressure in the heat of battle . Normally i would assess them clinically. The guy sitting up and would say how about more morphine . I would feel the polls and say that his Blood Pressure is fine. But if i have a guy cold and clammy and i cant feel a pulse, this guy is going into shock. Also remember that when we are not doing battle, this is your doc in a box. If a guy gets into a fight, i will sew him up. Someone with a sore throat. Or someone meets a girl that he shouldnt meet and comes back with the dribbles, i can give him a slog of penicillin. Everything is in boxes and crates. I have to pack this stuff up. There are times when we may have to bug out and retreat to the rear if i have people coming in that are the bad ones. The germans for the most part did honor our group for the most part. Story. Is a different and we honored their medical personnel for the most part. There was one story, i had a patient, he said it was foggy and you couldnt see your hand in front of your face. That there were two germans carrying something, getting ready to open fire. The german said dont shoot. They were two german medics that found a trooper in bad shape. They brought the trooper in, t life, they guy, saved his and they tried to scrounge out as much food as they could spare, because everyone was starving including the germans. They scrounged up some american cigarettes, and smuggled germans back to their own lines. Hearing good stories like that there are atrocities on both sides, right . As far ass tents, im concerned there is no nationality in this tent. I have six guys in front of me, two are americans, germans, im going to treat the most critical first. Im sure other Battalion Surgeons have different thoughts, but i am a doctor first. What else do we have back here . Come back into the rear of it. Battalion aid, it would be nice to have something that we could get the trooper out of the elements. You would never see a stretcher by itself. You would always see the stretcher in the field office thing. And we would have sawhorses, boxes, crates, something to get the trooper off of the ground so that the surgeon could assess and treat. Major surgery do here. I dont have time or general anesthesia. But if someone has a laceration that needs to be looked at, i will clean it up, irrigate it slugwater, give them a. F penicillin, and close it we didnt have disposable gloves. They had gloves for surgery, but after surgery they had to wash the gloves and put them on a blower, and then put them in the steam enclave. I dont have room for that, time, or electricity. So i wash my hands the best i can, put alcohol on it, and go for it. But again, my hands are not in someones gut. I hope not. Say someone has a big wound, shrapnel in their belly. No way i am going to take that out. I will leave it there because it can prevent further bleeding. If i pull that out i have something squirting in the face, and then i am in a world of hurt. Same thing if i have a chest wound. If i have a bayonet wound to the chest, what im going to do is put pressure dressings on, stabilize them, and get them out. A stageif the guy had to the thorax i could remove that, but i have to remember what is between my ears. There is no radiology, ultrasound, nothing like that. We talked about my hands, what about the instruments for sterilization . Steam not the steam, but it boils water and i sterilize my instruments. The suture that i use, if i were to close something, which most of the time i didnt, was surgical cotton. In close anyeason muscle, i would use this. What these are, these are catgut suture attached to a curve cutting needle. This is a last vial with a crimp in it. You would break this out on the sterile field. This is still sterile after all these years. I dont think the suture would be any good. Still, it is amazing. They all came in little packages like this. They had the little vials in it. Nowadays it comes in little tinfoil bags. They put those in the field. This, we will put quotes around this, a portable operating room table. When i get this out the troopers run because this is a monster to put together. Usually you would see most of these in the surgical area. Its nice to have this here , because these stretchers were not here, they were in the field. If i have someone that comes in i can just put them on this thing to work on it. Iv fluids, we talked about iv, the bottles that came in and we would reconstitute the plasma, after used the bottles, what would we do with them . Would we throw them away . No, we reuse them. Nothing was thrown away around here, except for second lieutenants. Just getting. Just kidding. Sometimes you would see a medic coming from the field. Tunic is gone. What happens when he runs out of dressings . Necessity is the mother of invention. He will tear off his tunic and start using that. The Battalion Surgeon, this would be my quarters. Im here 24 hours per day 7 days a week. I dont have a beeper, so they cant get me on the golf course. This would be my bunk. We tried to make everything work here. Luxury ofhave the going to ride a day getting resupplied. And getting resupplied. When am i going to get more bandages . I have no idea. We have some german bandages around here someplace. German prisoner of war, first thing i would ask would be, does he have any bandages . The germans, the first thing they would ask us is you have any american cigarettes . They did a remarkable job. We all love world war ii. We are all history enthusiasts. We love the war. It helps to keep it alive. It helps to educate the youngers. You get a kid today and you ask about pearl harbor, the kid will say wasnt she a singer . It is important. It is also to pay tribute to the men and women who died for our country, and the men and women serving ourl country. I tell the kids if you see a veteran shake their hand. Because if it was not for those guys we would be eating sauerkraut and fish heads. It is important to do this, important to keep it alive. This is why i do it. This is why i do it. I still dont understand how these guys they were making lifeanddeath decisions. All doctors do, but they were making life and death decisions on an hourly basis. Some of these Battalion Surgeons were the equivalent of a thirdyear medical resident. To decide which one of these guys were going to live and which one would die. I also had an italian surgeon. He is a patient but he is gone now. He said later on in life he had nightmares of the people he killed. I said you saved all of these lives. He said, if i had worked faster maybe i could have gotten to some of these other people. I ask him, i said, how do you do it . He said it was easy, i had to. If i didnt do my job people would die. Amazing is one of the things about these guys. Tonight on lectures in history the university of colorado denver professor sarah fields teaches a class about the 1981 jean harris trial. She was convicted of murdering the scarsdale diet doctor. Here is a preview. This case had everything, begging to be a major tv movie. Sexas sex, it has unmarried which is even more exciting. Betrayal, the other woman, wealth, privilege, its got celebrity. The scarsdale diet doctor is dead. No one knows his name but everyone knows the scarsdale diet dr. This is dramatic. Everyone wants to talk about it. The trial itself did not go the way it probably should probably, whether it is from a legal perspective or relate from anything. This is a quote from a woman who is a mystery writer here in colorado. There is a website about women who kill, and they asked her to summarize the case and talk about it. I think her summation is spot on. Was in as jean harris seriously and battled his vision at work. She was addicted to prescription meth. Her boyfriend of a decade and a half was slomo dumping her for a twinkie he had on the side. If she had outlined all that for the jury, the humiliation, stress, drugs, and followed it by saying simply, that i lost it and shot him, she would have been a free woman in a couple of years. But that is not what they did at all. Learn more on lectures in history. Join the classroom here on American History tv. Next on American History tv, three scholars discussed four aspects of the year 1619 the beginnings of representative government, the arrival of the first enslaved africans, the experiences of women, and the enslavement of native americans. Northern Virginia Community college and the office of Historic Alexandria cohosted this event. Welcome. In case you are wondering about cameras, cspan is covering this tonight for us. It will be broadcast may be a week from now. Year, we hold a lecture series in memory of a colleague who passed away a few years ago. Joseph winthrop, a dedicated and compassionate professor and social activist. And thees over there, woman who was married to him for many years is sitting here marilyn, glad to have you with us. We will complete this