Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany

Abstract

The ‘total war’ of World War I touched many aspects of German life. Heather Perry’s book looks at how soldiers’ bodies were affected, and she looks at both the effect on the bodies and how those partial bodies affected German society. Perry starts by contextualizing a lack of scholarly studies of German medicine in World War I. Chapter 1 looks at how orthopaedists moved from mainly focusing on congenital defects in children to trauma work, which had been the preserve of trauma doctors, of whom no more is heard. German orthopaedists blended surgery and physical therapy, but had to fight the traumatologists for surgical opportunities on adults. The war gave orthopaedists scope for professional growth, and the involvement of Kaiserin Augusta Viktoria smoothed their road into working with soldiers. One facet that is not explored is how the military health bureaucracy and its leaders welcomed orthopaedists; Perry looks at sources from and about orthopaedists, but not from the military. In Chapter 2, she works through new models of artificial limbs (especially arms) developed during the war. Function topped form, and Germans sought domestically manufactured arms to replace foreign suppliers. Perry draws attention to the orthopaedists taking control of limb design and manufacture from artisans and craftsmen, drawing both on their increasing body of knowledge and on the need for larger supplies. Chapter 3 looks more at policy. Initially, healthcare was split between military and civilian, and rehabilitation came after discharge from the military as disabled. (Perry does not explore wounded men who were retained in the military in a lower fitness category.) Just as peacetime ‘cripples’ were to be rehabilitated for work, the wartime cripples were to be rehabilitated, with both physical therapy and occupational therapy and/or vocational training. Many times the paternalistic doctor (and state) determined the training, just as the doctor determined the course of treatment. In Chapter 4, Perry identifies a medicalization of disability. This is a stronger change than in other countries, since the Bismarckian social security system had only a small role for doctors (and orthopaedists) with the disabled, and Perry ably tracks the changes, including trying to get patients to stop thinking of an injury as leading to a pension and not rehabilitation. Orthopaedists (somewhat shrilly) tried to get patients to see themselves as re-abled, not disabled. Chapter 5 looks at how the disabled were worked back into the war economy, although there is little comparison or contrast with other groups mobilized under the Auxiliary Service Law. Perry finds some effective case studies in lieu of pan-German analysis. In her conclusion Perry draws these threads together: doctors, patients, societal attitudes and the war.