The Face of Mercy: A Photographic History of Medicine at War

THE FACE OF MERCY: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF MEDICINE AT WAR is a powerful compendium of images and responses to the hungry monster of war that still stalks this sadly ignorant planet. For those who need to evaluate the madness and destruction of war unchanged since the beginning of time, this volume forces us to SEE via photographs taken from the time the camera was invented to the present: here is irrefutable evidence, uncensored by the media, that war is a pitiful response to those who fight and those who wait at home and especially those who are called to tend to the wounded and dying on the fronts and in the residual hospitals housing fragments of human lives that always follow war. The photography is for the most 'amateur' in execution, but that only emphasizes the immediacy of the brutality of the machine of death. From the opening photographs of Mathew Brady who froze the Civil War in the nineteenth century, through the horrors of World Wars I and II, the 'small wars' fought in civil conflicts in smaller countries, the Russo-Japanese War, the Korean War, the Vietnam tragedy, observations captured by Salgado, and the images from Somalia and Croatia which were the most recent wars at the time of publication of this book in 1993 - all are documented visually with enormous power. Writers of the quality of William Styron, Ward Just, and Stuart Nuland add to the impact of this paean and plea for peace. Yet some of the most touching elements of this important book are the asides from the soldiers and the medical workers in the field captured in utter simplicity by the author Matthew Maythons. If this book were in the homes of every family on the globe, perhaps the resultant response would be strong enough that mankind might be forced to witness that War is the Enemy, not People. Grady Harp, March 05

War's usual outcome is warped, maimed and dead men. 'The Face of Mercy' documents medicine's work to counter the cost for the soldiers and civilians who survive. With narrative by several authors, including Dr. Sherwin Nuland, 'Mercy' begins with an introduction by novelist William Styron. The book straddles the urge to destroy and the desire to heal. 'The body's very tissues reflect this struggle in their constant process of breakdown and repair,' Nuland writes. 'Unfortunately, the ability and impulse to cure have never kept up with the ability and impulse to kill.' The physician's will to save lives so near to battles is a conflict that partially explains why the text is strangely hopeful, given its subject. The large-format photography is matched by lucid writing. The battleground has yielded some of medicine's great accomplishments Ð mass inoculation, antiseptic surgery, blood and plasma transfusions, plastic reconstruction, and huge leaps in heart and lung surgery. Perhaps more importantly for soldiers, war observation established the relationship between speed of treatment and survival; the casualty statistics bear it out. In World War I, the average time between injury and treatment was 10 to 18 hours; surgeons write of removing battle dressings to discover maggots. In Vietnam, the swiftness and valor of helicopter pilots carved the wait to an average of one to two hours. In that conflict less than 2 percent of the hospitalized died. But some things are immutable. The psychological impact of war on doctors and the wounded remains. And as our inventiveness in destruction increases, so does the cost to the mind. One doctor who served in Vietnam writes of 'mud, screams and the terrible smell of death.' Napolean's chief surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, is said to have performed more than 200 amputations during a single day of the doomed expedition into Russia. Undoubtedly, men lived because of his extraordinary effort, but what butchering dreams did he live with afterward? The pictures, largely black and white, range from documentary to editorial. Physicians discovered photography could aid teaching and straightforwardly recorded their methods. But other images are heavy with emotional weight, such as 'A Morning's Work,' a haphazard monument of men's amputated feet and legs, piled outside the door of a Civil War hospital. The effect of war upon civilians is also represented. Survivors in St. Petersburg are shown delivering their bundled dead aboard a child's sled, to a dynamited mass grave. In Leningrad, an estimated million died from starvation, waiting for the war to end. The city's loss was more than the combined military and civilian death toll for both the United States and Great Britain during all of World War II. Lisa Ashmore