This year, you could hardly have missed it: It is 100 years since the First World War started. We have already seen many services of remembrance, commemorations, conferences and exhibitions. At the same time, there has been increasing attention paid to re-evaluating the role of medical aid during the war, not only in medical history magazines, but also in more generalist journals like First World War Studies, which has regularly published medicinerelated articles. A book on British medical aid has recently been published (Harrison 2010), as has a book containing chapters on medical aid in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Hofer, Prüll, and Eckart 2011). This is not surprising, for the subject is anything but exhausted. Nor can it be, because the war was too varied, medicine was too varied and as a consequence medical aid during the war was certainly too varied. It differed from country to country, from army to army and from frontline to frontline. Take, for instance, the role of psychiatry in Austria-Hungary. Because of its multi-ethnic, multilingual army, the mostly German-speaking psychiatrists and neurologists used therelatively mute-'quick cures', such as electric current, longer and more harshly than their German, French or British colleagues (Hofer, Prüll, and Eckart 2011, 49-71). Medical care also differed according to whether a wounded or sick soldier was treated in an official military medical ambulance, an ambulance provided by Quakers or by a neutral country. And then there was the huge variation in the personal convictions, attitudes and characters of the individual doctor or nurse providing the care. Did he or she embrace war as the 'doctor of doctors', strengthening the mind and body of the people or race? Or did he or she curse war for all the physical and mental damage it inflicted on the individual? It is clear from this that war not only influences medical practice, but also medical thinking. This is, however, not to sayas is frequently claimedthat 'war is good for medicine'. On the contrary, medicinecertainly for the First World Warwas good for war. Without medical care, the different battles would have had to be waged with fewer soldiers and as a result, would not have lasted so long. As a consequence, medical aid not only saved lives; it also cost lives. Not for nothing did the war give rise to voices calling for a medical strike, for that would be more in keeping with the Hippocratic oath than the constant patching up of the wounded, only to return them to a new baptism of fire. But war also indirectly influenced medical decision-making. It is, for instance, not a coincidence that after decades of deliberation, in 1917the