World War I

“Techniques and specialties were improved, particularly in psychiatry, orthopedics, and plastic surgery, and the phrase ‘physical medicine and reconstruction’ came into general use for the first time – heralding the mixed blessing of machine therapy in the 1920s. . . . Physicians from all parts of the country were brought together, evaluated, sent through medical camps, and commissioned in a large, highly organized medical system based on hospitals. The younger generation of physicians, affected by the specialization, teamwork, and organizational efficiency of wartime medicine, might be expected to return to peacetime conditions with a different view of medicine from that of their older, pre-Flexner colleagues (Stevens, 140).