Chelsea Physic Garden, WW2

Chelsea Physic Garden, WW2 - Gresham > .

Chelsea Physic Garden - cpg > .

The Art and Healing Power of Plants at Chelsea Physic Garden - cpg > .

Cultivated Rx - Healing Plants, Grow Your Own Medications - anth >> .
Plants - Medicinal & Toxic - Ben >> .
Medicinal Foraging, Grow Your Own - Savoir >> .

With over 5000 species of plants - many of them medicinal or otherwise 'useful' to our lives - Chelsea Physic Garden still serves the same purpose almost 350 years after it was founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.

The Garden was considerably affected by both World Wars; with the Home Front fully mobilised to do everything it could to support the war effort, Chelsea Physic Garden contributed.

Plants and medicines were in short supply in both conflicts, so the public was encouraged to start collecting or growing plants to help with the effort. Many of plants had previously been imported from Europe, but this was no longer possible. The Government even issued leaflets helping people to identify plants outdoors and with advice on growing essential plants. The types of plants that needed to be grown were similar in both wars, and the Government issued lists of these plants. (Ayres 2015)

Kew Gardens contributed to growing food for the Second World War effort, but Chelsea Physic Garden made other contributions; in light of the enhanced need for medicine, the Garden made use of their extensive medicinal collection. The Garden sent belladonna (Atropa belladonna) and Digitalis (heart medicines) and Hyoscyamus (anaesthetic) to the University College Hospital in 1940, and they also supplied Atropa belladonna to the Ministry of Health in 1943. During World War II the demand led to a resurgence in the interest in medicinal plants. (Minter 2000)

Chelsea Physic Garden ..

Chelsea Physic Garden, WW2 ..

Combat Medicine

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Early Clinics - Sexual Health

Impact of Britain's early sexual health service - Birb > .

The first UK clinics for venereal disease (VD) were established during the interwar years. These clinics were available to anyone, you could walk in off the street or be referred by a GP and importantly they were also free at the point of use... they changed the way that British people thought about their relationship with state-provided healthcare. The VD clinics are by no means a precursor to the NHS, but they did provide a blueprint for modern health services.

Endell Street Military Hospital - WW1

Spanish Flu Influenza Pandemic 1918 - 1920 - tgw > .

The Women Doctors Who Fought to Serve in World War I:

“No Man’s Land” tells the story of the Endell Street Military Hospital, which treated the casualties of war pouring into London during World War I — and which, except for the occasional male orderly, was staffed entirely by women.
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This was as shocking as it was revolutionary. Women doctors were almost unheard-of. Barred from studying at most institutions except for the London School of Medicine for Women, they were relegated to low-status, low-paying jobs in schools, prisons and asylums; most treated only other women and children. None of the men who would come to the Endell Street hospital had ever been treated by a woman before.

Two pioneering doctors — Louisa Garrett Anderson, a 41-year-old surgeon whose mother, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first woman ever to qualify as a doctor in Britain, and Flora Murray, 45, an exacting Scottish anesthesiologist — saw a vacuum, and rushed to fill it. The upending of conventions necessitated by the war, as well as the desperate need for new hospital beds to treat the tens of thousands of injured and sick soldiers converging on London, offered the perfect opportunity to prove that women were equal to men.

Both women were also passionate suffragists, and the struggle for the vote went hand in hand with the struggle for professional acceptance. (They also lived together, though their careers were so interesting that their sex lives seem almost beside the point.)

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The first casualties arrived in May, 1915, in convoys of up to 80 men at a time; by the end of the first week, all 520 beds were filled. Typically, between 400 and 800 new patients would arrive each month, many needing immediate surgery (much of it performed by Anderson), many with grievously infected wounds, many suffering from acute shell-shock, “more wounded in their minds than in their bodies.”

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Exhausted, worked to the bone, forced to improvise and develop new techniques on the fly, the women proved themselves capable of handling nearly everything thrown at them during the war. The Spanish flu brought them to the point of despair. It came in three waves during 1918 and 1919 and killed between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population.

Medical | Endell Street Military Hospital ..

Evolution of Medical Masks

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Medical History - Corp >> .