In 1937, after a natural gas explosion destroyed a high school in New London, Texas, near the end of a school day, nearby oil workers ran from the fields to find a pile of smoldering rubble. Underneath the debris, they could hear the screams of teenagers and teachers. In the hours after what was then the second worst disaster in Texas history the actual death count was never determined but about 300 lives were lost President Franklin Roosevelt put out a request for medical aid over the radio, and by that evening, doctors and nurses had descended on the town, coming from as far away as Shreveport, Louisiana. Hundreds of vials of anti-tetanus serum were driven to the scene of the blast. Help was certainly needed. The oil workers pulled out over 200 victims, flagging down passing cars that hauled the injured and dying to the nearest sickbay. The Associated Press reported, “The hospitals were jammed.”
From earthquakes to wars to floods and hurricanes, the history of disaster medicine is replete with success and failure when it comes to the results of the physicians, nurses and medical administrators who help during, and in the aftermath of a crisis. And it’s a long history. “Really, when you look at where disaster medicine started, it goes back to the Civil War battlefields, and even pre-dating to Roman times,” says Gary M. Klein, M.D., MPH, MBA, who practices acute care medicine in Atlanta. As a general rule, it’s never been a lack of willingness of the medical profession to help as a tragedy unfolds, but the efficient execution has sometimes been lacking, notably during some high-profile catastrophes in the last few years.
Disasters are chaotic by nature and the medical community has too often gotten caught up in the turmoil. Nevertheless history is repeating itself, and here the repetition is welcome; just as in previous eras, physicians examined their techniques when responding to and treating disaster victims, this latest generation of healers is adapting to new, varied and horrific threats. Nevertheless the actual term disaster medicine only began cropping up in the newspapers with some regularity during the 1950s when medical associations chose to adopt the idea of expecting a disaster. They were frequently hosting seminars trying to gauge how doctors might fare in a post-nuclear attack. Colonel and physician Karl H. Houghton spoke to a convention of military surgeons in 1955, telling them, “You won’t have sufficient drugs or surgical materials to handle all the casualties and will have to decide rapidly and without hesitation who will receive this perhaps life-saving material. This is not always simple. Do you save the banker or the truck driver? Do you go right down the line of casualties taking them as they come, or do you pick out those individuals who might be the most valuable in terms of the rehabilitation period to come?”
From earthquakes to wars to floods and hurricanes, the history of disaster medicine is replete with success and failure when it comes to the results of the physicians, nurses and medical administrators who help during, and in the aftermath of a crisis. And it’s a long history. “Really, when you look at where disaster medicine started, it goes back to the Civil War battlefields, and even pre-dating to Roman times,” says Gary M. Klein, M.D., MPH, MBA, who practices acute care medicine in Atlanta. As a general rule, it’s never been a lack of willingness of the medical profession to help as a tragedy unfolds, but the efficient execution has sometimes been lacking, notably during some high-profile catastrophes in the last few years.
Disasters are chaotic by nature and the medical community has too often gotten caught up in the turmoil. Nevertheless history is repeating itself, and here the repetition is welcome; just as in previous eras, physicians examined their techniques when responding to and treating disaster victims, this latest generation of healers is adapting to new, varied and horrific threats. Nevertheless the actual term disaster medicine only began cropping up in the newspapers with some regularity during the 1950s when medical associations chose to adopt the idea of expecting a disaster. They were frequently hosting seminars trying to gauge how doctors might fare in a post-nuclear attack. Colonel and physician Karl H. Houghton spoke to a convention of military surgeons in 1955, telling them, “You won’t have sufficient drugs or surgical materials to handle all the casualties and will have to decide rapidly and without hesitation who will receive this perhaps life-saving material. This is not always simple. Do you save the banker or the truck driver? Do you go right down the line of casualties taking them as they come, or do you pick out those individuals who might be the most valuable in terms of the rehabilitation period to come?”
