Free Battle Field Angels by Scott Mcgaugh Page A

bench. Lipes pricked Rector’s ear and used a torpedo stopwatch to time how long it took the blood to clot to make sure Rector wasn’t a hemophiliac.
    Pajamas sterilized in torpedo alcohol served as surgical gowns. Five tablespoons with handles bent backward became retractors. Lipes would have to monitor Rector’s pulse rate by watching blood vessels pulsing in his opened belly. Sailors ground sulfa tablets into powder for sprinkling into the patient’s stomach to fight infection.
    Infection had always been a major killer in war. During World War I, 1.8 million Allied soldiers died from battlefield wounds—after reaching a military hospital. 11 Infection accounted for an estimated 10 percent of all German deaths in World War I. Military doctors understood the necessity of cleaning wounds and used a weak bleach solution to sterilize them, but they had no broad-spectrum, systemic antibacterial drugs to fight infection from within the body. As a result, wound infection was so common it often was called a “military disease” and barely rated a mention in leading surgery books written between the Civil War and World War I.
    For many soldiers who survived the battlefield, hospital gangrene led to a gruesome death. A fever developed a few days after being wounded. Vomiting and diarrhea followed. After the wound became swollen, it typically turned black and fetid. Then tissue began to fall off, exposing muscles. As gangrene progressed, the muscles separated while vomiting and diarrhea increased. If that didn’t kill the wounded man, eventually veins and arteries disintegrated until he bled to death and his pitiful screams ceased. Hospital gangrene was a weeklong hell.
    Gerhard Domagk, a German researcher, saw the horrors of wound infection as a medical assistant in the Ukraine during World War I. Under brutal operating conditions, he watched surgeons insert dirty magnets into entry wounds in search of shrapnel. He was powerless as half the men in his postop ward died of gangrene. Domagk survived the war, intent on making medicine his career.
    At Bayer, a German pharmaceutical company, Domagk began testing chemical dyes used to stain invisible bacteria so doctors could monitor infections. If a poison could be attached to the dye, perhaps it could become lethal to the many bacteria species that caused a wide range of infections and diseases. Both had killed more soldiers in war than the enemy.
    Wheeler Lipes was twelve years old on Christmas Eve, 1932, when Domagk made a startling discovery. Four days earlier, Domagk had given a red dye called Prontosil to a group of mice infected with streptococcal bacteria. By Christmas Eve, every mouse treated with Prontosil was free of infection. All the mice in the untreated control group had died. Domagk was stunned. He replicated the test time and again, with similar results.
    At one point he gave Prontosil to his daughter who was very ill. She recovered completely. Domagk had discovered sulfonamide, the world’s first antibacterial drug. His discovery sparked worldwide research into different types of sulfonamide, which proved to be effective against pneumonia, streptococcal infections, common types of meningitis, and other diseases. On the eve of World War II, newly developed mass production capability made sulfa drugs a potent new weapon against wound infection in the hands of surgeons, corpsmen, and medics.
    In 1939, Domagk received the Nobel Prize in physiology, but it was awarded in absentia. The Gestapo had arrested the researcher to prevent him from accepting it in person because Domagk had refused to support the Nazis.
    By 1941, every corpsman and medic carried a supply of sulfa. Soldiers’ first aid pouches included sulfa powder and tablets. Five grams of crystalline sulfanilamide powder were to be sprinkled over open wounds. Sulfadiazine tablets were taken orally, except in cases of stomach or throat wounds. Sulfa was known to cause nausea and abdominal cramps, but its