Going for the Burn: Medical Preparedness in Early Cold War America

Quoted in Boyer P. , By The Bomb's Early Light (New York: Pantheon, 1985): At 239.

Boyer P. , “Physicians Confront the Apocalypse: The American Medical Profession and the Threat of Nuclear War,” JAMA 254, no. 5 (1985): 633–643. This essay was reprinted in Boyer P. , Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998): 61–86.

This is an immense literature; an excellent starting place is McEnaney L. , Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Garrison D. , Bracing for Armageddon: Why Civil Defense Never Worked (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Grossman A. D. , Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Krugler D. F. , This Ls Only a Test: How Washington D.C Prepared for Nuclear War (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

Pearse H. E. Payne J. T. , “Mechanical and Thermal Injury from the Atomic Bomb,” New England Journal of Medicine 241, no. 17 (1949): 647–53, at 649.

For a discussion of dual purpose radiation experimentation, see The Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.)

Lindee M. S. , Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): At 32.

“No Nagasaki Rays Found,” New York Times, September 23, 1945, 4.

“Effects of Atomic Bomb Explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” JAMA 131, no. 7 (1946): 598–99.

Keller P. D. , “A Clinical Syndrome Following Exposure to Atomic Bomb Explosions,” JAMA 131, no. 6 (1946): 504–506, at 504.

“Atomic Bombs Caused 320,000 Jap Casualties,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1946, at 1.

LeRoy G. V. , “The Medical Sequelae of the Atomic Bomb Explosion,” JAMA 134, no. 14 (1947): 1143–1148, at 1148.

Parsons R. P. , “Trauma Resulting from Atomic Explosions,” American Journal of Surgery 76, no. 5 (1948): 559–562 at 559.

Gibbons Roy , “U. of C. To Train Physicians for Atom Disaster,” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1947, 3; “Chicago University will Teach Doctors How to Treat Victims of an Atomic War,” New York Times, October 1, 1947, 27.

Jacobson L. Stone R. S. Garrott Allen J. , “Physicians in an Atomic War,” JAMA 139, no. 3 (1949): 138–140, at 138.

Ld., at 140.

Pearse H. E. Payne J. T. , “Mechanical and Thermal Injury from the Atomic Bomb,” New England Journal of Medicine 241, no. 17 (1949): 647–649.

Saxe N. T. , “Burns en Masse,” US Naval Medical Bulletin 40, no. 3 (1942): 570–579.

DeBakey M. E. Carter B. N. , “Current Considerations of War Surgery,” Annals of Surgery 121, no. 5 (1945): 545–63. See also Saffle J. R. , “The 1942 Fire at Boston's Cocoanut Grove Nightclub,” American Journal of Surgery 166, no. 6 (1993): 581–91, and Ravage B. , Burn Unit: Saving Lives after the Flames (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2004.)

Fauley G. B. Ivy A. C. , “Prevention of Flash Burns by a Protective Glove Film,” US Naval Medical Bulletin 43, no. 2 (1944): 209–215. The researchers made tests on some 60 Naval personnel “volunteers.”

Parsons , supra note 12, at 559.

See Liebow A. A. , Encounter with Disaster: A Medical Diary of Hiroshima, 1945 (New York: WW Norton, 1970): At 132 for an image of a Japanese man burned wearing a “light-weight singlet.” DeVore R. , “What the Atomic Bomb Really Did,” Collier's, March 2, 1946, 36.

Not all medical scientists accepted the racial association. In his The Biology of the Negro (1942), pathologist Julian Herman Lewis speculated that a keloid was simply more conspicuous on dark skins, and that the growth was not uncommon in white people. “Illustrations of keloids in textbooks are almost invariably taken from Negro subjects, and in the American literature, when certain features of the tumor are reported, the cases in illustration are likely to be in colored people.” Still Lewis associated greater pigmentation with keloids, citing the fact that “other dark but non-Negro races,” including Tahitians, Hindus, Australians, and Malayans, experienced higher rates of the growth. See Lewis J. H. , The Biology of the Negro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942): 332–334.

See Lederer S. E. , “Darkened by the Shadow of the Atom: Burn Research in 1950s America,” in Eckart W. , ed., Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006): 263–78.

Harkins H. N. Cope O. Evans E.I. Phillips R. A. , “The Fluid And Nutritional Therapy Of Burns: Memorandum Prepared By A Committee Appointed By Dr. Alfred Blalock, Chairman Of The Subcommittee On Shock,” JAMA 128, no. 7 (1945): 475.

Rhodes R. , The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Touch-stone, 1986): 767.

Evans E. I. , “The Burn Problem in Atomic Warfare,” JAMA 143, no. 13 (1950): 1143–46.

Evans E. I. , “Flash Burn Studies on Human Volunteers,” Surgery 37, no. 2 (1955): 280–297.

“Surgeons Told A-Blasts Burn Before you Feel It,” Richmond Times Dispatch, May 18, 1954.

Smith S. L. , “Mustard Gas and American Race-Based Experiments in World War II,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36, no. 3 (2004): 517–21.

See, for example “Toxicity of Primaquine in Negroes,” JAMA 149, no. 17 (1952): 1568–70. The incidence of anemia among Negroes receiving this drug prompted a study on “Negro volunteers” at Illinois State Penitentiary, on 52 enlisted Negro personnel at Fort Knox, and on 317 “Nicaraguan natives who had a mixture of Indian and Negro Bloods.”

See Lederer S. E. , Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.)

Evans E. I. Biggar I. A. , “The Rationale of Whole Blood Therapy in Severe Burns,” Annals of Surgery 122, no. 4 (1945): 693–705.

Evans E. I. Purnell O. J. Robinett P. W. Batchelor A. Martin M. , “Fluid and Electrolyte Requirements in Severe Burns,” Annals of Surgery 135, no. 6 (1952): 804–17 See Pruitt B. A. Wolf S. E. , “An Historical Perspective on Advances in Burn Care Over the Past 100 Years,” Clinical Plastic Surgery 36, no. 4 (2009): 527–45.

Evans E. I. , “Atomic Burn Injury,” JAMA 145, no. 17 (1951): 1342–45.