Physicians during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. The feat of physicians during the Great Patriotic War

Physicians during the Great Patriotic War showed no less heroism, steadfastness and courage than soldiers, sailors, pilots, rear officers and officers. Girls-nurse on fragile shoulders carried out the wounded fighters, medical personnel of hospitals worked for days without leaving patients, pharmacists did their utmost to provide the front with highly effective medicines in the required volumes. There was no easy post, job, place of work - each of the physicians contributed.

The War Begins

The medical service, like the whole army, entered the war in the conditions of its sudden onset. Many activities aimed at improving medical supplies and supplies were still largely incomplete. Divisions of the border districts entered into hostilities with a limited supply of medicines, tools and equipment. The greater the feat of physicians during the Great Patriotic War, who managed to save the health and lives of fighters and civilians under difficult conditions.

From the first day of the war, a tense situation arose both with the supply of operating troops and with the production of medical equipment by industry. The main stocks of medications, surgical instruments, dressings, concentrated in the border districts, did not have time to take out. The significant volumes of medical property that were destined for the units being formed and deployed were lost.

Despite the loss of sanitary warehouses, thanks to the heroic labor and the enormous efforts of military pharmacists, more than 1,200 wagons of medical and sanitary property to the rear of the country were removed from the surviving warehouses of the frontline zone.

The experience gained by blood

The hardest for the country 1941 ended with the long-awaited first great victory of the Red Army in a grueling battle near Moscow. Here the feat of physicians during the Great Patriotic War was especially vivid. Photos of that period captured the footage of fighters rescued from the hurricane fire and bombardments by paramedics and nurses. Often there were cases when health workers covered themselves with the wounded, sparing no lives. On the intensity of the medical service says unbiased statistics. During the Moscow battle, a huge amount of medical property was spent:

• Only on the Western Front more than 12 million meters of gauze.
• Kalinin and Western fronts used up more than 172 tons of gypsum.
• Widely assisted, regimental and divisional kits, which contained the most important medicines, serums, sutures, syringes , were widely used. From front-line warehouses of the Western Front, 583 regimental and 169 divisional sets were issued to the troops.

Methods of organizing medical supplies in the Moscow battle, summarized at a meeting in the GVSU of the Red Army on April 12-15, 1942, made it possible to more effectively provide troops and medical institutions in subsequent operations of the war.

Moscow is behind us!

Physicians during the Great Patriotic War have learned how to work effectively under conditions of defense (retreat), both in the offensive and in rapid breakthroughs to a greater depth of the front. In many respects, valuable experience was obtained with long-lasting defensive defense and subsequent counteroffensive in the Moscow direction. The battle near Moscow made it possible to adjust the organization of medical support for troops in conditions of transition from defensive operations to an offensive operation of a strategic scale.

Even before the start of the defensive battle near the capital, the medical service of the Western and Bryansk fronts had done a great job of putting in order its forces and assets, which were significantly weakened as a result of the large losses in the first two months of the outbreak of war. Particular attention was paid to the staffing of the medical units of regiments and divisions by orderlies and porter-nurses.

At the front line

Numerous facts are known about doctors during the Great Patriotic War, who did not spare their own lives, to take out, evacuate, and by any means deliver the wounded to the hospital from the battlefield. I had to work under fire, in the heat and rain, in mud and snow.

The removal of the wounded was particularly difficult in case of deep snow cover. Therefore the most reliable sanitary vehicle, especially during snowstorms and snowdrifts, were sleighs. And not only for transporting the wounded to the regimental medical posts (PMP), but often for their evacuation from the PMP to the divisional first-aid posts. It became clear that there was a need to have appropriate means of strengthening in the composition of the medical service units. Such means became the horse-sanitary companies included in the composition of the medical services, which greatly facilitated the operational evacuation.

Hospitals

Military doctors during the Great Patriotic War tens of thousands worked in hospitals. For example, in the period 1941-1942. Only in the armies of the Western Front there were 50 field mobile hospitals and 10 evacuators with a total capacity of 15,000 regular beds. The hospital base of the Western Front was deployed in two echelons on two evacuation routes. The total capacity of the hospital base reached 42,000 beds. In the first echelon, mostly field medical institutions were deployed, and in the second echelon - almost exclusively evacuation hospitals.

The feat of physicians during the Great Patriotic War was their selfless daily work. The main efforts of the medical service were aimed at evacuating the wounded and sick as quickly as possible from those areas that were threatened with enemy capture by providing medical assistance. A significant number of lightly wounded, as well as the injured of medium gravity continued to remain in the ranks. The significant sanitary losses that the troops of the Kalinin and Western fronts carried from the very beginning caused the arrival of at least 150-200 wounded per day, and in days of intense fighting - up to 350-400.

Pharmacies

Physicians during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) fought not only on the fronts. Serious problems, sometimes extremely heavy, delivered the back supplies of pharmacies with vital medicines. The fulfillment of tasks on medical supply was also complicated by the fact that an impressive group of pharmacists and doctors left for the active army. The number of pharmacists working in pharmacies was reduced in 1941-1942 by half.

The systematic supply of drug stores with products, medicines was seriously disrupted: most of the medical industry enterprises were destroyed or evacuated. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, military pharmacies were manned mainly by pharmacists called to mobilize from the reserve. Most of them had secondary pharmaceutical education and never served in the army. A significant part of the workers were women who completed a shortened period of study in pharmaceutical schools. A number of posts in pharmacies were occupied by paramedics.

Special difficulties experienced the chiefs of military pharmacies, in one person representing all the established posts. In addition to professional duties, pharmacists also had economic chores. They themselves wrote the documentation, received medicines, sterilized solutions, washed the chemist's dishes. And military requirements for the preparation and use of drugs to master had to go. The contribution of physicians during the Great Patriotic War was important not only on the front line, but also in the pharmacy network.

Example of service

The history of the Second World War is rich in the facts of how the role of one person influenced the fate of thousands. The main burden in rescuing lives and preserving the working capacity of wounded fighters was taken up by medical surgeons during the Great Patriotic War. Photos of outstanding specialists can be seen in print, museums, on the Internet. Illustrative example of an outstanding surgeon and organizer Vasily Vasilievich Uspensky.

After the occupation of his native Kalinin (now Tver), the talented doctor headed the Kashinsky district hospital. Simultaneously, he was a surgeon of this medical institution, a consultant for evacuation hospitals deployed in Kashin, neighboring settlements and a regional hospital evacuated to this city. It was he who operated the legendary pilot-hero AP Maresiev. At the Kashinsky hospital Vasily Vasilyevich organized a blood transfusion station and a regional scientific society of doctors.

In 1943 V. Uspensky returned to Kalinin, where he organized a special hospital, through which more than 3,000 children were transported by planes from the enemy rear. This child hospital was known even outside the country. In particular, Mrs. Clementine Churchill, the wife of the British Prime Minister, enthusiastically responded to the service of Uspensky.

Ophthalmological care

On the battlefields, injuries and eye injuries happened often. Among the wounded soldiers who were on treatment, the greatest number consisted of patients with fragmentation and bullet wounds of varying severity, requiring surgical intervention. Only in Saratov hospitals during the war, doctors of specialized ophthalmological departments and eye disease clinics helped restore sight to 1858 wounded and 479 patients.

The staff of the department and the clinic of eye diseases, headed by Professor IA Belyaev, made a significant contribution to the development of methods of rendering medical aid on the battlefield in case of eye injury, as well as diagnosis and treatment of eye injuries at the hospital stage. Saratov physicians during the Great Patriotic War greatly improved diagnostics and methods of therapy of inflammatory eye diseases, new technologies were introduced into the everyday practice of ophthalmologists.

How to deal with the shortage of medicines

The heroism of physicians during the Great Patriotic War was manifested in the rear. There was an acute shortage of medical supplies in the country, so the task was to revive the pharmaceutical industry, mostly destroyed at the beginning of the war. For a short period of supply of medications managed to establish.

This was facilitated by:

• Moving a significant number of enterprises of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry to Central Asia. This led to the creation of an eastern group of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry, which assumed the bulk of the supply of medicines .
• Assistance to the countries of the anti-fascist bloc. Cooperation allowed to mount the most powerful plants for the production of streptocid, sulfidine and sulfazole, chloroethyl and pharmacopeic soda.
• Reorientation of non-core industry enterprises. The factories of the textile industry who started to make medical gauze contributed to the way out of the situation of lack of dressings. Also many enterprises of the chemical industry began to supply ampoule preparations to public health authorities: adrenaline, caffeine, glucose, morphine, pantopone and others.
• Replacing scarce pharmaceuticals with medicinal plants. Only in the spring of 1942 were collected about 50 tons of thirty-six species of medicinal plants. The scientists reconstructed the technique of replacing the cotton wool on the peat moss sphagnum and got a fir immersion oil instead of the traditional and became scarce cedar.

Development of new medicines

Women-physicians during the Great Patriotic War made an outstanding contribution to the development of new highly effective medicines. A significant breakthrough was the receipt of a group of Soviet scientists led by Professor Z. V. Ermolieva, the first samples of penicillin. The research group Ermolieva conducted a study of the therapeutic effect of the new drug Penicillin-Krustozin VIEM in wounds and wound complications in medical battalions close to the battlefields in the rear services clinics.

The Central Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, which was headed by Professor MK Krontovskaya, mastered the technique for producing typhoid vaccine. The People's Commissariat for Health of the USSR recognized this remedy as effective in combating typhus that raged at that time, and decided to use a new serum on a mass scale.

Scientific discovery of world significance was the development of the method of freeze drying of plasma by the employee of the Leningrad Institute of Blood Transfusion, Professor L. Bogomolova. She got the opportunity, without knowing the blood group of the wounded, to pour large doses of the drug called "dry plasma" from the donor. With this method of transfusion, the donor blood is converted into a powder, which is stored for a long time and is well transported.

Nursing feat

In the Second World Need for Nurses sharply exacerbated. In accordance with this, the Healthcare Ministry was engaged in accelerated training of nurses. Before 1945, the Red Cross Committee had trained more than 500,000 sandwich girls, 300,000 nurses, and more than 170,000 doctors. Watching death in person, they bravely carried the wounded from the scene of the fighting and assisted them.

You can talk about the heroic deeds, looking at the fate of the nurse battalion of Marines Catherine Demina. She was a pupil of the orphanage, she was on the medical ship Krasnaya Moskva, which sent the wounded from Stalingrad to Krasnovodsk. Life in the rear quickly fed her, Catherine decided to become a nurse of the 369th Separate Marine Battalion. At first the paratroopers coolly accepted the girl, but she won respect. For all time Catherine saved the lives of more than 100 wounded, killed about 50 fascists, and she received 3 injuries. EI Demin was awarded a lot of awards.

In the Second World War, the Red Cross successfully coped with accelerated studies of nurses and nurses, and self-sacrifice, kindness and love for the Fatherland helped medical workers to provide the wounded with recovery and return to the front. Thus, everything possible was done for the Victory.

Afterword

Soviet doctors during the Great Patriotic War worked miracles, putting wounded soldiers on their feet. According to statistics, from our hospitals, more than 70% of those who entered the hospital returned to the system for treatment. For example: German doctors managed to return to the army only about 40% of the wounded.