Sixteenth-Century Military Medicine
The military hospital had to deal mainly with surgery cases—limbs injured by sword, pike or gunshot. Of the three, bullet-wounds were by far the most serious. On one occasion when many of his men were wounded, Don Luis de Requesens reflected that: “Most of the wounds come from pikes or blows, and they will soon heal, although there are also many with gunshot wounds…and they will die.” All the medical textbooks of the time confirm this judgement: a bullet was more likely to cause internal bleeding, induce blood-poisoning or shatter a bone—three conditions which sixteenth-century medicine was powerless to cure. Yet within these limitations, the Army’s doctors and surgeons registered some remarkable successes. Of 41 badly injured Spanish veterans in 1574, for example, 1 had lost both legs and 3 both arms, 5 more had lost the use of one leg and 13 lacked a hand or an arm (left and right limbs suffered equally); 11 more were recorded as having bad gunshot wounds (in their mouth, their eye or disabling a limb) and 4 more had lost a limb by a cannon ball. The roll-call is gruesome but it gives a remarkable testimony to the skill of the army’s surgeons: all these unfortunates had survived their injury. For such mutilated survivors a special home was established in the seventeenth century: the “Garrison of Our Lady of Hal”. In January 1640 there were 2 officers, 236 soldiers and 108 entretenidos in the garrison, all of them injured veterans too maimed for service in the field.
— The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659, p. 168
