Acknowledgments and Attributions
Early in 2013 George Thompson suggested that Kansas City held the resources to create a website devoted to Medicine in the First World War. Thus, combining the substantial holdings of The National WWI Museum and Memorial with the strong faculty of the University of Kansas Medical Center it has been possible to achieve this end. A group of faculty and museum staff was created and this has served as the First World War Medicine Study Group, principally responsible for the creation of this website. The extensive records of Base Hospital #28 held by the museum’s archives have been carefully examined by the faculty of the medical center, eventuating in a number of scholarly presentations and several published papers. The web development and management group at the medical center assisted with the creation of the site.
The records of Base Hospital #28, in 1918 sited at Limoges, France, are extensive and include a variety of reports, patient records, hospital records, x-rays, statistical data, and over 1,000 black and white images from photo albums and scrapbooks detailing medical and hospital practice. Planned for 500 beds the hospital expanded to nearly 3,000 beds as battle casualties and influenza epidemic patients poured in, 400 to 600 per ambulance train.
Ten essays of a thousand words each with accompanying images about Base Hospital #28 form the core of the website. It is hoped that the years from 2014 until 2018 will see that additional similar essays about all possible medical topics will be added to this website, making it a large compendium of First World War Medicine studies. The sponsorship of Dr. Matthew Naylor, President and CEO of the National WWI Museum and Memorial and Dr. Chris Crenner, chairman of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Medicine, are gratefully acknowledged.