Reading suggestion

Ospedale da campo 040 di Cortina

Today, to change a bit, I want to recommend a book that talks about a subject that is often not treated by us recuperators and in general when talking about the Great War: medicine in the First World War.

In fact, testimonies of heroes or intellectuals are always favoured, those, to be precise, who are shot in the forehead and have time to utter very long sentences, always extolling high sentiments, victories and the honour of the regiment.

In historical reality, dying from a blow to the forehead was lucky.

The majority of fighters were injured and did not die immediately. One cannot understand what war is without knowing the devastation in the mutilated bodies of infantrymen, Alpine troops or territorials with wives and children.

In this book, Ragucci, a Neapolitan from the Neapolitan bourgeoisie, is a medical major, catapulted into the heart of the Dolomites, in my beloved Cortina, to run field hospital 040 in the Menardi family's famous Hotel Cristallo, beneath the Faloria woods.

This, in my opinion, is the epicness of the Great War: a Neapolitan who recounts the unique fascination of snowfalls, woods, streams and nights in one of the most beautiful places in the world, but at the same time tells what happens inside the hospital where for two years hundreds of soldiers are torn apart, frozen and submerged by avalanches.

It really makes you understand what the fighting and the war in the cold, the war over 2000m altitude with all the problems that had never been addressed, including precisely those concerning high-altitude medicine.