Diorama showing a First World War field dressing station

The scene shows a familiar sight during the First World War (1914-1918), injured soldiers being carried by stretcher bearers from a dressing station towards ambulances that will take them to casualty clearing stations further behind the front line. Other wounded men sit around waiting for attention. Within a makeshift operating theatre, a surgeon is depicted using a kitchen table as an operating table while his instruments are being sterilised using an autoclave heated by a small portable stove. Although a stylised and conflated version of frontline medical units, this diorama capture some of the busy chaos that would have been encountered by medical teams during and after a battle on the Western Front. Mobility and flexibility were key characteristics of medicine near the frontline and medical and surgical equipment had to be light enough to be transported to wherever it was needed.

The First World War was fought using industrialised weaponry that had devasting impacts on the bodies of soldiers, with artillery, bullets and poison gas causing a range of often highly complex wounds. Such was the scale of the conflist that across all fronts, sixty-five million troops fought of which over nine million were killed and nineteen million were wounded.

The scene shows a familiar sight during the First World War (1914-1918), injured soldiers being carried by stretcher bearers from a dressing station towards ambulances that will take them to casualty clearing stations further behind the front line. Other wounded men sit around waiting for attention. Within a makeshift operating theatre, a surgeon is depicted using a kitchen table as an operating table while his instruments are being sterilised using an autoclave heated by a small portable stove. Although a stylised and conflated version of frontline medical units, this diorama capture some of the busy chaos that would have been encountered by medical teams during and after a battle on the Western Front. Mobility and flexibility were key characteristics of medicine near the frontline and medical and surgical equipment had to be light enough to be transported to wherever it was needed.

The First World War was fought using industrialised weaponry that had devasting impacts on the bodies of soldiers, with artillery, bullets and poison gas causing a range of often highly complex wounds. Such was the scale of the conflist that across all fronts, sixty-five million troops fought of which over nine million were killed and nineteen million were wounded.