Eyewitness To World War I Medicine

Details the actions of nurses, doctors, medics, ambulance drivers, and other medical personnel during World War I. Additional features include a bullet-point summary of the events, compelling narrative descriptions, primary source quotes and accompanying source notes, questions to spark critical thinking, sources to guide further research, historical photographs, informative captions, a table of contents, an index, and a phonetic glossary.

Fought on almost every continent, World War II confronted American GIs with the unprecedented threats to life and health posed by combat on Arctic ice floes and African deserts, in steamy jungles and remote mountain villages, in the stratosphere and the depths of the sea.

Glimpsing Modernity is a collection of papers presented at the US Army Medical Museum-sponsored conference on medical aspects of the First World War held in San Antonio, Texas, in February 2012. It captures the metamorphosis of military medicine during the war in a series of inter-related vignettes. Some of these stories provide new and insightful interpretations of known military medical themes, while others depart from these to examine less well-known, but truly important medical topics.

For as along as people have lived together in communities, infectious disease has been a part of everyday life. The fascinating story of disease-causing microbes, bacteria, and viruses crosses every area of human existence from medicine, social history, and geography to art and natural history. This unique guide takes you on a compelling journey through time and into the future, from the plagues of the Ancient Egyptians to the laboratories of the twenty-first century. Written by science and medical expert Brian Ward and produced in association with The American Museum of Natural History, Epidemicis one of the few in-depth explorations of this extraordinary subject for the ordinary reader. Discover the battle against epidemics from the Black Death and smallpox to the modern superbug.

When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of war correspondent Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, Americans mourned him in the same breath as they mourned Franklin Roosevelt. To millions, the loss of this American folk hero seemed nearly as great as the loss of the wartime president. If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call “The Good War.” Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column—all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell. It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent—a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death. In this immensely engrossing biography, affectionate yet critical, journalist and historian James Tobin does an Ernie Pyle job on Ernie Pyle, evoking perfectly the life and labors of this strange, frail, bald little man whose love/hate relationship to war mirrors our own. Based on dozens of interviews and copious research in little-known archives, Ernie Pyle's War is a self-effacing tour de force. To read it is to know Ernie Pyle, and most of all, to know his war.

The first English translation of writings that capture the lives and thoughts of German soldiers fighting in the trenches and on the battlefields of WWI. German Soldiers in the Great War is a vivid selection of firsthand accounts and other wartime documents that shed new light on the experiences of German frontline soldiers during the First World War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of ordinary soldiers that have been covered up by the smokescreen of official military propaganda about “heroism” and “patriotic sacrifice.” In this essential collection of wartime correspondence, editors Benjamin Ziemann and Bernd Ulrich have gathered more than two hundred mostly archival documents, including letters, military dispatches and orders, extracts from diaries, newspaper articles and booklets, medical reports and photographs. This fascinating primary source material provides the first comprehensive insight into the German frontline experiences of the Great War, available in English for the first time in a translation by Christine Brocks.

Through narrative nonfiction text, readers learn about numerous roles of women during the war, including as spies, army nurses, factory workers, and pilots. Additional features to aid comprehension include a table of contents, primary-source quote sidebars, fact-filled captions and callouts, a glossary, an introduction to the author, and a listing of source notes.