New diseases such as Shell Shock, Trench Fever, Trench Foot ahd especially that disabling malady known in Army circles as DAH. were laboriously investigated in new special hospitals, to the enormous benefit of the sufferers. To meet the enormous demand for doctors for all these services the British Medical Association issued an appeal which was in all parts of Britain enthusiastically received. The appeal called for medical men under 40 for service with the troops; for medical men over 40 for service in hospitals; for medical men who remaining in their practices would give part of their time to military work; and for medical men who would undertake part of the civil work of practitioners who were on service In spite of the response of the British doctors, at the end of nine months of war, the War Office was still 2,000 doctors short and this deficiency was wisely made up by enrolling medical officers from the Dominions and the United States.
Equally serious was the shortage of trained nurses—large number care in contingents from overseas but the deficiency was chiefly supplied by abandoning the tradition that wounded and sick soldiers must be nursed by trained and certificated nurses and the wholesale employment of the members of Voluntary Aid Detachments both at home and abroad saved the situation, and these partially trained amateur nurses soon proved themselves worthy of the best traditions of the nursing profession, There is no time for me to speak jof the innumerable organizations that came into being for the care of the disabled British soldiers after his wounds were healed and he was able to be discharged from the General Hospital where he had originally arrived from overseas. The science of Orthopædics or the treatment of deformities under the skilled directions of that master of this branch of surgery Sir Robert Jones, enthusiastically supported, and aided by the lay efforts of King Manoel of Portugal, did more for the wounded soldier than has ever been dreamt of by the lay public. The great Orthopaedic hospital at Shepherd's Bush where cripples were transformed into useful citizens will ever be remembered by all those who passed through its wards.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.