6 medical innovations that moved from the battlefield to mainstream medicine

Wartime medicine is an incredibly challenging setting for the doctors, nurses, and paramedics who practice it: Not only are the injuries frequently serious ones, but the tools at hand are often more limited than in a traditional hospital.

Over the centuries, that has meant that battlefield medical personnel have had to innovate. Those wartime practices, in turn, often served to refine medical practice beyond the military.

Here are six cases in which wartime clinicians changed the way medicine is practiced more broadly.

Tying off

War’s biggest killer has always been blood loss. That’s not a surprise, given the weapons of war over the ages, including swords, bayonets, bullets, grenades, and missiles. But it was a 16th-century Italian war that popularized a means to slow or stop the bleeding. In 1537, a French