Shock was treated at the front lines by injecting camphor, a heart stimulant that did nothing to compensate for the patient’s loss of blood. Unlike the allied medical departments, the Japanese did not use plasma expanders at the front and their patients had to wait until they reached the Field Hospital before receiving any blood. Even then it was from injections with a 100 cc syringe filled with blood from another soldier of the same blood type. Medical 2nd Lieutenant SAVATARI Zengoro reported: "Blood transfusions had been resorted to in New Guinea, but it had been found impossible to handle many cases. Stress had at one time been laid on blood grouping, but in desperate cases surgeons had ignored this on the theory that 'any blood was better than none.'" [1] The delay in receiving blood and inadequate amount of administered to the wounded hampered their chances of survival.
Anaesthesia: Local anaesthetics, such as cocaine, novocaine, or morphine, were the most commonly used for anaesthesia by the Japanese Army, usually injected at the base of the spine. While at the beginning of the war, many American surgeons advocated spinal anaesthesia for military surgery, experience quickly showed that wounded men had a poor tolerance toward the procedure since it caused the patient's blood pressure to drop. Chloroform was used only in some major procedures. The advantage of Chloroform was that it could easily be shipped, required little elaborate equipment to administer, and it produced excellent muscle relaxation. In the United States, Chloroform had been practically discredited in civilian practice well before the advent of the war, since it tended to slow the heart rate and could cause liver or kidney damage.
Surgery: The surgical instruments provided to the Japanese Army show the degree to which the Medical Department was willing to create specialised instrument sets to perform specific, even rare, procedures within the combat zone. These kits had no real counterparts in the U.S. Army, which had considerable difficulty in procuring such specialised instruments during the war. However, the assumption of the U.S. Army was that the wounded needing these kinds of procedures could be evacuated to the rear to receive specialised care. The existence of these sets suggests that there was no such assumption and that Japanese hospitals almost functioned as individual units rather than a part of a larger system.
Notes
1. Interrogation Report 86:10.
Japanese medical:
Overview text Images Evacuation Gastroenteritis Hospitals Malaria Nutrition Physicians Surgical WATANABE TetsuoClick images to enlarge.
M-177 00208
M-660 00117
M-151 00351
