Railway work was so dangerous that an entire medical specialty developed to deal with it. In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, companies hired “railway surgeons” to staff private hospital and health care systems. An on-call doctor could rush to the scene of an accident, or be ready to receive a bleeding, injured worker sent to them by train. They were pioneers in emergency medicine and specialized in amputations and prosthetics. Some consider them the world’s first trauma surgeons.
Keep in mind that this was after the adoption of the Janney coupler and Westinghouse air brakes. That the railroad companies had their own doctors was pretty forward-thinking in an era where blue-collar workers were regarded as being as interchangable as the machines they operated.
3 comments:
Sikorski S64 Skycrane (don't know the DoD dsg) was designed, amongst other things, to land MASH units on the battlefield.
This actually surprises/unsurprises. My reading of railroad accidents has been they were not unlike logging accidents, which were more often than not fatal. Getting cut in half pinched between railcars would not be unlike becoming the grease in greasing the skid-roads. When I fell in '86 it was my good fortune to be on a helicopter job, with a ready ride to the hospital; had they needed to hump me five miles out by hand, load me in a pickup and drive sixty miles to the hospital, it's doubtful I would have made it. Doctors in the camps had their hands full with lice and dysentery, women and children. Not sure if/that they were up to major casualties; never heard one way or the other.
Pleasant surprise, not often pick something up out of nowhere that adds to the database.
CH-54.
...and before the adoption of the Janney coupler or the Westinghouse air brakes, you had things like the Staplehurst incident, notorious because of one famous passenger, and of which various extremely distressing accounts can be found.
Post a Comment