Fragments in the cavity: reassessing conventional warfare through abdominal wounding (late nineteenth to early twenty-first century)

This article explores abdominal wounds caused by conventional modern weaponry – notably infantry weapons and artillery fire – from a historical perspective. As a rule, the soldiers were particularly afraid of 'belly' injuries, because being hit in the abdomen was usually extremely serious, if not lethal. Indeed, mortality rates from abdominal wounds skyrocketed during the second half of the nineteenth century, rising to over 85% during the US Civil War and remaining over 50% during the First World War. Soldiers with abdominal wounds would saturate the sanitary chain and doctors often chose to let them die in order to save other men, whose wounds did not require as much time or resources. Both soldiers and medical personnel faced a terrible spectacle, that of soldiers in great distress and suffering, amply documented by medical reports and testimonies. Overall, abdominal wounding seemed not only to have amplified widespread emotions and representations associated with warfare, such as fear, hopelessness and disgust, but also to have impacted military and medical policies related to logistics, technology, patients' rights and concern for casualties, as well as humanitarian efforts to promote regulation of warfare. Consequently, looking at the injured abdomen allows one to suggest and discuss changing regimes of wounds during the modern period. This research at the crossroads of social sciences rests on archives, medical publications and memoirs from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, mostly from France, Great Britain, the United States, and East Central Europe.