Men will always die for lack of discoveries made soon after they are dead.

From Waterloo A Near Run Thing by David Howarth. Page 135.

In cottages and barns on both sides of the battlefield, surgeons were busy with their knives and saws. Most of the wounded still lay where they had fallen, but enough had walked or been carried off the field to overwhelm the medical services.

It is easy now to look on the surgery of 1815 as mere butchery. But each generation is satisfied with the medical treatment of its own time, and men will always die for lack of discoveries made soon after they are dead. At Waterloo, there were no antiseptics and no anaesthetics: both were in the future. But it was a time when army surgery was improving quickly. People could still remember the days when no treatment at all was given to the wounded, who were largely left to the care of the local popu­lation, whether it was friendly or not. Not very long before, the great surgeon John Hunter had written that ‘it was hardly necessary for a man to be a surgeon to practise in the army’. And John Hennen, who was a surgeon at Waterloo, remem­bered that in his own early days army surgery was looked on as ‘the lowest step of professional drudgery and degradation. If a man of superior merit by chance sprung up in it, he soon abandoned the employment for the more lucrative, the more respectable, and the less servile work of private practice.’ By 1815, there were still some very bad surgeons in the army, but there were some good ones too, who were working on the frontiers of the knowledge of their day. So a soldier looking back on his father’s time could think himself lucky.