ABSTRACT
Since the advent of the war and society specialization in military history, much of the emphasis has been placed on establishing the interconnectivity of armed conflict and broader social themes in the human experience, and to a lesser extent, the natural environment. As the specialization expands its reach to consider war’s impact on our social institutions and awareness, it is only natural that it examines the most personal of physical and perceptual spaces—the connection and consequence to the human body. Again, this is in some ways a well-established subset of our collective literature on war. The experience of wounds and death has been recorded and contemplated since ancient times. Assyrian and Babylonian medical treatises detailed treatments for a variety of stabbing, cutting, and crushing wounds (Scurlock and Andersen, 2005). The most evocative descriptions of injury in ancient battle are found in The Iliad, including in graphic detail the injuries inflicted upon its participants. Roman accounts of battle are likewise rich in detail of combat’s toll on the body. Such accounts, however, serve generally as descriptive narrative only, providing the reader an evocative sense of the ferocity of battle, but lacking any larger context. As a discursive and analytical lens, war and society methodology grants interested historians the ability to consider how other social institutions, including the medical profession, respond to conflict on multiple levels. These range from individual treatment of wounds to the creation of sophisticated support infrastructures dedicated to leveraging the coercive powers of the state to promote public health across the broader population as a whole, in the name of security.
