Article ID: CBB355785793

The Deceit of the Cold: Trench Foot between Neurology and Dermatology (2020)

unapi

In the light of the French debate between dermatologists and neurologists and on the basis of archival documents, the essay analyses the contribution of Italian Military Health Department to studies on vascular pathology known as ‘trench foot.’ The disease affected thousands of soldiers on all fronts of the First World War and resulted in the loss of life or the mutilation of the lower limbs. Military doctors of all armies made use of new technologies – microscopy, photography and radiography – for new experiments that served to settle the controversy over the causes of the phenomenon and to distinguish between freezing from intense cold and ‘trench foot.’ This allowed for the overcoming of archaic practices in the treatment of cold injuries, but above all a new approach to the care of soldiers in the perspective of their reintegration into daily life. This criterion, together with the collaboration between military and civil health care, constituted a novelty that inserts the studies on the ‘trench foot’ among those examining the social aspects of war medicine. Furthermore, the article shows the continuity of these research studies up to the present day beyond the needs of war because they are linked to a better understanding of the relationship between man and the environment in the perspective of new life–saving therapies and new explorations on earth and in space.

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Authors & Contributors
Campanile, Benedetta
Fabbricatore, Fabio
Adello Vanni
Jevremović, Petar
Macleod, Sandy
Donato Bragatto
Concepts
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
World War I
Psychiatry
Science and war; science and the military
Medicine
Hospitals and clinics
Time Periods
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
Italy
Canada
United States
Edinburgh
Turin (Italy)
Institutions
Red Cross Societies
Phipps (Henry) Psychiatric Clinic
Canada. Canadian Army. Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps
Johns Hopkins Hospital
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