title: Emergency War Surgery: Third United States Revision, 2004 (Textbooks of Military Medicine)
author: Andy C. Szul
description: Defense Dept., Army, Office of the Surgeon General, Borden Institute
zlib_text: i
  
  iii
  THIRD UNITED STATES REVISION
  2004
  
  iv
  “All the circumstances of war surgery thus do violence to civilian
  concepts of traumatic surgery. The equality of organizational and
  professional management  is the first basic difference. The second
  is the time lag introduced by the military necessity of evacuation.
  The third is the necessity for constant movement of the wounded
  man, and the fourth — treatment by a number of different
  surgeons at different places instead of by a single surgeon in one
  place — is inherent in the third. These are all undesirable factors,
  and on the surface they seem to militate against good surgical
  care. Indeed, when the over-all circumstances of warfare are
  added to them, they appear to make more ideal surgical treatment
  impossible. Yet this was not true in the war we have just finished
  fighting, nor need it ever be true. Short cuts and measures of
  expediency are frequently necessary in military surgery, but
  compromises with surgical adequacy are not.”
  —Mich