Many medical innovations can be attributed to war and the demands to keep soldiers healthy or restore them to active and productive lives. According to a recent TV news article, improvements in body armor have been responsible for keeping more soldiers alive, but since the armor protects the torso, many veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan now come back with debilitating injuries like missing limbs which has created a demand for improved prosthetic devices. Because of this demand, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is investing heavily in the development of improved prosthetic arms and hands.
Despite the barbarity of war, throughout history it has been responsible for many advances in medicine. Advances during the Civil War included the development of anesthetic methods, facial reconstruction techniques, the field use of ambulance systems and development of organized triaging methods. Perhaps one of the most important advances in the Civil War was the development of nursing as a respectable profession.
One of the most unusual medical advancements resulting from war was the development of the infant incubator. This occurred at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870’s when the French government had been unable to raise a large enough army to defeat the Germans. They realized that if they were to survive as a nation, they would have to take steps to halt the decline in their country’s birthrate. As part of the government’s effort to increase population growth, they created laws that led to the development of maternity benefits, obstetrical services and other forms of social legislation designed to assure a healthy population. As a result of these efforts to increase the birthrate, maternity hospitals began developing around Paris and laws were written to guarantee women free hospitalization for childbirth. These changes were successful as the French nation began to see an increase in hospital births. Concurrent with these changes was the growth of the specialized field of obstetrics with an emphasis on the survival of low birth weight babies.
Although, at that time, incubators had been used routinely by poultry farmers, no one had thought to use them to improve the survival of low birth weight infants. According to many historians, it was Stephane Tarnier a leading French Obstetrician who reputedly conceived the idea in 1878 after seeing poultry incubators at the Paris Zoo. His designs enclosed the infant in a sealed cabinet surrounded by a water jacket that was heated by gas. Despite the crudeness of Tarnier’s design by our modern standards, the dramatic reductions in infant mortality that he achieved assured the ultimate adoption of his idea. The success of Tarnier’s efforts led to many design improvements as others adopted the concept and incubators became part of the worldwide standard of nursing care for low birth weight babies.
When we consider the many medical innovations that have been attributed to wars and the elaborately sophisticated incubators that help sustain the lives of precious newborn infants, it is hard to realize that the initial reason for their development was to assure that the population of France would have sufficient manpower to survive or wage a European war.
