Watercolor Images from The Battle of Waterloo
Above is a watercolor image originally painted by a Scottish surgeon and gifted artist named Charles Bell. During the Battle of Waterloo, Bell witnessed many horrific and gruesome injuries, many of which he was careful to record and then transform into medical artwork.
From the Wellcome Library’s blog:
Leaving for Belgium on 26 June 1815, Bell took with him his surgical instruments and a sketchbook, in which he could document the injuries he witnessed and tended to. In 1836, he turned his sketches into a series of stunning watercolours, which are on deposit at the Wellcome Library from the [Royal] Army Medical Services Museum. Four of these watercolours are to go on loan to the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn for a major exhibition, ‘Napoleon und Europa: Traum und Trauma’ (‘Napoleon and Europe: Dream and Trauma’), which will run from 17 December 2010 to 25 April 2011.
The watercolours provide us with a graphic representation of the dreadful injuries suffered by soldiers fighting at Waterloo. The images of missing arms, protruding intestines and gaping wounds to the chest and neck - together with the pained expressions on the soldiers’ faces - all convey the horror of the scenes witnessed by Bell and other surgeons in the battlefield hospitals.
Bell wrote descriptions to accompany his paintings. For one, of a soldier suffering from a head wound, he noted:
“…On the fifth day after the battle was insensible. A portion of the frontal bone, an inch in diameter, was found driven into the brain, and it stood perpendicularly; not possible to extract it, from its being firmly wedged. Trepanning performed. Quite insensible during the operation and showed no sensibility until on the next day, being bled, he shrank….On the removal of the bone a quantity of blood and brain came out, and coagulum was scooped out from betwixt the skull and dura mater. Three days after the operation he became more sensible, and has been improving.”
All of these medical and surgical procedures were of course performed without any semblance of septic technique, wound preparation, or antibiotics as none yet existed. No surgical gloves were worn, no masks, no nothing. After going through my surgical rotation, I can say that the idea of these types of crude operations being done in the open with men in plain clothes leaves one with a very different image of surgery. The wounds themselves are unfortunately not completely dissimilar from much of what is seen today in wars or even just in trauma cases. The evolution of sterile technique from the time of Waterloo until today often makes me wonder which of today’s medical and surgical practices we will look back on as being archaic and barbaric.
