Lunch Colloquium--Tuesday, January 21

Ren Davis, Retired Administrator and Consultant, Emory Healthcare. Author of Caring for Atlanta: A History of Emory Crawford Long Hospital

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

In 1914, following a series of diplomatic blunders and blusters and incidents of violence and (un)healthy doses of arrogance on every side, the Great Powers of Europe went to war.  After three years of fighting in which millions of men died or were wounded, under the leadership of generals who believed throwing more men into battle might turn the tide in their favor, the sides faced each other from their trenches across a sea of mud in a ghastly stalemate.

The United States had sat on the sidelines unscathed and, in fact, President Wilson had won his second term campaigning on a policy of isolationism. But that policy was reversed in 1917, and the United States entered the war and began to prepare to do as the President said, "make the world safe for democracy." But a lot of preparation was required. In 1917, the United States standing army was fewer than 300,000 men. There were no tanks, virtually no other modern equipment, and no Medical Corps. 

This was the background to the talk about the Emory medical unit's involvement in the war that Ren Davis gave to the Emeritus College Lunch Colloquium on Tuesday, January 21.  A retired administrator from Emory Healthcare and Crawford Long (Emory Midtown) hospitals, he is the grandson of Dr. Edward Campbell Davis, one of the founders of the Davis-Fischer Sanitorium, renamed Crawford-Long Hospital in 1931.

Dr. Davis, whose father had been a Confederate Army surgeon, was almost uniquely qualified for the task he was called upon to perform. He had served as an army surgeon during the Spanish-American War and had retained his military rank. When the Army Surgeon General, who together with the Red Cross was charged with coming up with the necessary medical personnel to form the Medical Corps in 1917, sent out a call to medical schools to assist in recruiting doctors and nurses to serve, it's no wonder that medical school Dean William Elkin turned to Dr. Davis for help.  Dr. Davis had lots of contacts at Emory and in the greater Atlanta medical community.  Working together with his partner, Dr. Charles Dowman, Dr. Davis pulled together a group of medical personnel that on August 30, 1917, was officially named Emory Unit Base Hospital 43, US Army, American Expeditionary Force.  Of course, this fledging unit was not yet ready for service.  It was not until April 1918, that the officers reported to Camp John B. Gordon (current site of Peachtree DeKalb Airport) for training and not until June 1918 that the unit was shipped to Europe on the RMS Olympia (sister ship of the doomed Titanic).  They took with them their own ambulance!

Once across the Atlantic, and then the English Channel, they were sent by train to Blois, south of Paris, to set up their hospital.  Several buildings were commandeered and by July 3, barely a month later, the hospital was operational with 939 regular beds and additional emergency beds. It was not long before they were needed.  General Pershing, Commander of the American Forces, had refused to comply with the British and French requests that his fresh troops be used to fill in for casualties in the trenches.  (Upon arrival he is alleged to have said, "Lafayette, nous voici," which cannot have sat well with the British commanders.)  When the American troops went into battle, they fought as units under American command. By August 15, fighting had already sent Base Hospital 43 a thousand patients.  The Meuse-Argonne battle in the fall of 1918, at long last the turning point of the war, sent them thousands more.

Medical treatment was organized in a four Tier system.  Tier one was a first aid station close to the front.  Soldiers who needed more care were sent to Tier two, a field hospital 2-4 miles behind the lines. (These were the early forerunners of the medical units portrayed in the TV show MASH, though they didn't have helicopters bringing in the wounded!) Tier three was an evacuation hospital 10-15 miles from the front lines, near the railway so that the most serious and complex cases could be shipped by train to Tier four - the base hospital.   Although in its relatively short existence between July 1918 and the end of the war in November and the wrap-up afterwards, Base Hospital 43 treated 9,000 patients, there were only 102 reported deaths.  This number seems remarkably small until one considers that many wounded soldiers died before they reached the hospital.  Even so, with open wards full of men suffering from the flu and other contagious diseases and with treatment options so limited, it is an impressive statistic. There was only one staff death in the Emory Unit- a nurse by the name of Camille O'Brien who died of spinal meningitis.  In December 1918, the hospital staff received a commendation from General Pershing, and they returned to Atlanta in March of 1919 to great fanfare.

Ren Davis listed several notable members of staff besides his grandfather including Dr. Frank Kels Boland, who amongst other achievements was instrumental in having the statue of Crawford Long placed in the US Capitol, and Joel C. Harris, son of Joel Chandler Harris, born at the Wren's Nest, who served as Quartermaster.

The war brought many medical advances including motorized ambulances, organized triage systems for treating patients, antiseptics and disinfectants to combat infection, improved anesthesia,  developments in prosthetic limbs, use of vaccines to reduce the spread of contagious diseases, advances in blood typing, a portable X-ray machine designed by Marie Curie, and early understanding of shell shock or so-called battle fatigue known today as PTSD.  Great medical advances to set beside the terrible cost of the war in lives lost or shattered.

It is now more than 100 years since the end of the Great War that, unfortunately, did not end all wars.  Yet the memory of its horror and the loss of a generation still resonates today (not least in literary and cinematic evocations, as, for example, two major films of the past year, They Shall Not Grow Old and 1917). During the Second World War, which also didn't end all wars, Emory equipped another team, mobilized as General Hospital 43. This unit, which served in North Africa and France, treated more than 20,000 patients. Let us all hope and pray that this proud heritage of service not require Emory to staff another hospital in a future Third World War.

Thank you to Ren Davis for his presentation and the exhaustive research behind it, bringing a not well-known story of Emory to us in the Lunch Colloquium.

--Jan Pratt

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Interdisciplinary Seminar--THE SOUTH--Fall, 2019--Part II

This is a continuation of the report on the Interdisciplinary Seminar THE SOUTH.  For the first part, please see the previous issue of this Newsletter, Volume 6, Issue 10.  The picture above is of many of the participants:

Back row L to R: Linda Hubert, Tolly Williamson, Woody Hickox, Gretchen Schulz,

                            Don O'Shea

Front L to R: John Juricek, seminar leaders Marilynne McKay and Jim Roark

(Not in photo: Don McCormick, Delia Nisbet, and Spencer King)

 

 

 

 

 

Marilynne McKay (Medicine, Dermatology) led a discussion on regional cooking, which typically borrows from local populations. In the South, Indian tribes ate squash, corn, and deep-pit barbecuing; the slave trade introduced African spices, black-eyed peas, okra, rice, eggplant, sorghum and melons. English/European settlers grew wheat, and raised cattle and chickens, maintaining a diet that included sugar, flour, milk, and eggs. Traditional Southern meals tended to be seasonal and vegetable-rich, typically including beans, rice, a little pork, and "greens" with cornbread, the latter a cornerstone of Southern cuisine, along with grits, fritters, and hoecakes.

Linda Hubert (English, Agnes Scott) addressed "Fallen Angels: Several 'Ladies' and their 'Me-Too' Moments in Early/Mid-20th Century Southern Literature." John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, two of the Vanderbilt Fugitive poets, both dispel with irony the paralyzing futility of clinging to romanticized views of the southern past that include idealized notions of ladylike behavior and chivalric male honor.  

Robert Penn Warren's narrative poem Brother to Dragons reveals a brutal slave culture that also victimizes women with false expectations of feminine virtue and subjugated roles as his narrator (Thomas Jefferson's nephew Lilburn Lewis) scapegoats his self-loathing by making his wife surrender to an obscene sexual act that pulls her from the pedestal on which he has placed her. Victor Fleming's direction of the domestic "rape scene" from the film of "Gone with the Wind" inspired a comparison with Margaret Mitchell's text, which seemed subtler than the film in conveying Scarlett's abandonment of any "proper" pretensions to a lady's forbearance of sex - and less intent on emphasizing Rhett's apology for dishonorably taking advantage of his estranged wife.

Gretchen Schulz (Oxford, English) introduced "Country Music: 'Three Chords and The Truth'" with a video clip of Hank Williams, "the hillbilly Shakespeare," singing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," a song epitomizing the heart-rending authenticity and truth-telling of country music.  She contended that we are all so lonesome we could cry--because we are all "wayfaring strangers, a-traveling through this world of woe," men and woman "of constant sorrow" that may be mitigated by the love of other strangers met along the way, though love itself may be a source of sorrow, witness the many country songs detailing the innumerable versions of pain that this irresistible pleasure inevitably entails. We heard (and watched) a dozen performances including Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Reba McEntire, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Willy Nelson, and others, ending with Kris Kristofferson offering his take on the lonesomeness we (oxymoronically) share: "Sunday Morning Coming Down." In the end, we agreed that the unhappiness that infuses such music is perhaps the most "southern" thing about it, reflecting the fact we've referenced often in this seminar, that "this world of woe" has often proven even more woeful for southerners than for others, given the history of loss that haunts the region still.