A Casualty Clearing Station Summary

In reading Dr. John A. Hayward’s account called “A Casualty Clearing Station” from www.firstworldwar.com, he states that his time caring for patients in the suburbs did not prepare him for what he was to experience as a doctor/surgeon in the war, tending to injuries fresh from the battlefield. Hayward speaks of the state of shock, panic he was in the first time he cared for the wounded directly from the frontline, a memory that would always stay with him. As I continued to read his story, I was curious as to how those injured on the frontline were brought to him. I decided to write about the process of transporting the injured and where were they brought. I want a clearer picture of those brave individuals that went into the fields to bring back soldiers who needed care, and who tended to the wounded. The designated place where the casualties were taken to be cared for, to either be sent to back to the frontline or transported out of the battleground are called Casualty Clearing Stations - CCS. CCS is a short-term military medical facility, most often tents, where the doctors would separate the wounded depending on the degree of their injury. The

The surgeons “sawed bones and stitched arteries, cut back damaged flesh, repaired abdomens and faces, all at breakneck speed”. A variation of the French guillotine was used to amputate limbs as those “severed limbs stacked up like logs for disposal”. With the surgical instruments being used so much, they had to have cutlers nearby to sharpen them often. Nurses working the frontline, hospitals, CCS as well as the hospital ships and railways, were often seen as angels of compassion by the soldiers they cared for. One nurse shared that one of their more serious wards was called “the nursery” as the wounded were so helpless due to debilitating