1 War and Medicine
Despite Hippocrates’ statement that “war is the only proper school for a surgeon,” contemporary historians of medicine have long overlooked the complicated relationship between the two. The interconnection between war and medicine has, however, covertly entered military and medical discourse for centuries In Susan Sontag’s study on the spread of syphilis and tuberculosis during and at the close of the First World War, she references public education campaigns where diseases were cast as an invasion of the body. She states that “military metaphors became a credible and precise means of conceptualizing disease” (Sontag 1990: 97).
