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Brain Trauma Foundation guidelines drafted in 1995 have been
widely adopted. Iranian physicians who treated the wounded in the
Iran-Iraq war also helped treatment advance.

In the 1946 issue of the Annals of Surgery, U.S. Army Maj.
Ralph A. Munslow chronicled in exquisite detail the emergency care of
140 soldiers and civilians who suffered grievous head wounds — mainly
from shell fragments — during the 5th Army's 1944 operation to seize and
hold a beachhead in Anzio, Italy.

While liberally sprinkling antibiotic sulfa powder, and later
penicillin, directly into his patients' gaping head wounds, Munslow
meticulously collected all traces of foreign bodies and skull fragments,
he reported. Where it was not possible to coax out debris with a
magnet, Munslow would poke his finger into the soft tissue in a thorough
effort to clean the patient's brain.

It was an approach that prevailed — with refinements — through the
Vietnam War and beyond, yielding only in recent years to new
discoveries about the dynamics of the injured brain. Today,
neurosurgeons are more likely to remove large chunks of intact skull
than to vacuum up tiny shards of debris — to give an injured brain room
to expand while also leaving it in peace to recover from a violent
insult.

"A lot of what was done in the... >>>