WHAT WE'VE DONE
The recently published book, “Out of the Crucible: How the U.S. Military Transformed Combat Casualty Care in Iraq and Afghanistan,” co-edited by USU leaders, says it best: “From the founding of our nation to today, Americans have benefited from advances in military medicine …
“The battlefield has long served as the classroom for medical advances. For centuries, under the pressure of delivery care in wartime, medical personnel have used their creativity and powers of observation to develop better methods to treat the ill and injured. Over time, the broader medical community adopted these techniques, to the benefit of us all.
The pace and discovery and knowledge-sharing accelerated during the American Civil War, and more recently, during the two world wars and the conflicts that followed. Today, we take many of these advances for granted: use of helicopters for aeromedical evacuation; use of morphine and other drugs to treat agonizing pain; safe approaches to cross-matching and transfusing blood and plasma; surgical techniques to treat damaged blood vessels and other forms of life-threatening trauma; and rehabilitation to help trauma victims recover from invisible as well as visible wounds.
This tradition continued in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In little more than a decade, the U.S. military transformed its approach to combat casualty care from the point of injury on the battlefield through successful reintegration of wounded warriors into their communities. In the process, the military took a combat care system that was already considered the best in the world and made it better -- much better.”
USU faculty, staff and alumni have played major roles in these more recent advances and remain on the forefront of discovery, innovation and improvement.