Medicine Looks Ahead 237 



field hospitals. Battleships and aircraft carriers have their own 

 hospital units, all complete. Smaller war vessels may depend 

 on the hospital ship. 



Special boats are used by the Navy to rescue men from 

 sinking vessels or aircraft disasters over water. When an air- 

 craft goes down, fast rescue craft which skim along shallow 

 creeks to the scene bring survivors ashore at speeds of fifty 

 to sixty miles an hour. 



In its report on care of the wounded, the OWI pointed out 

 that "it does not take into account other safeguards for the 

 well-being of service men; how we rehabilitate wounded men 

 in our great Army and Navy hospitals in this country, how 

 plastic surgery restores mutilated faces so perfectly that only 

 a physician can be certain any change from the original has 

 taken place; how paralyzed limbs are returned to full useful- 

 ness by massage, exercise, and treatment by special apparatus; 

 how a method replaces skin destroyed by burns, how therapy 

 brings back to normal minds which have not withstood the 

 shock of war, brings them back so completely that often they 

 are stronger than before their brief retreat." 



The Magical Sulfa Drugs 



Army and Navy doctors, and research workers in labora- 

 tories throughout the nation, are searching ceaselessly for new 

 weapons against infection and disease. We have reason to feel 

 that in the future the peacetime conquests of medicine will 

 save many more lives than the war takes. 



In his book Behind the Sulfa Drugs: A Short History of 

 Chemotherapy, Dr. lago Galdston writes: 1 



"The sulfonamide compounds have proved to be the great- 

 est achievement in therapy, with the competence to save more 



1 Galdston, lago, Behind the Sulfa Drugs. New York, D. Appleton- 

 Century Co., Inc., 1943. 



