Medicine: Death by Concussion

Last week the Berlin radio boasted that Germany has a superbomb which could kill men by concussion and destroy everything within a radius of 1,600 ft. The distance was incredibly great, but death by concussion is an established wartime fact. In an article by Dr. Solly Zuckerman, famed Oxford anatomist, the British medical journal The Lancet last week described the damage, often fatal, which may be done to lungs by explosions.

In World War I and the Spanish Civil War, dead soldiers, without any visible wounds, were found near the sites of heavy explosions. Sometimes bloody fluid trickled from their noses and mouths. Examination of the lungs showed hemorrhages, pleural lesion or collapse. Recently Dr. Zuckerman undertook for the Ministry of Home Security a series of experiments on pressure waves from explosions and the effect on lungs. Using piezoelectric recorders (crystals which convert pressure into electric current), he found that the blast from 125 lb. of high explosive builds up a pressure of 200 lb. per square inch at a distance of 15 ft., falling off to only 10 lb. at 50 ft. Dr. Zuckerman exploded uniform 70-lb. charges of H. E. in paper containers on the ground, tested the effect on mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, monkeys and pigeons at distances ranging from 70 to 13 ft. At 50 ft. lung damage began to occur, and at less than 18 ft. almost all the animals were killed. He printed a photograph of a pair of concussed rabbit lungs so deeply suffused with hemorrhagic blood that they looked like raw liver.

Dr. Zuckerman described one case of a man injured in a recent air raid. A medium-calibre bomb fell through the roof and exploded in the same room with him. His only external injury was deep laceration of the thigh, but he died in twelve hours. Autopsy disclosed numerous hemorrhages of the lungs.