World War II

“Lasting contributions included vaccines against influenza, typhus, and cholera, new drug treatments of malaria, the development of the insecticide DDT, and the separation of human blood plasma into therapeutically useful constituents (albumin, globulins, and clotting factors) for the treatment of shock and control of bleeding. Probably the most important contribution of the program was the development of methods of mass-producing penicillin. . . . During World War II, the army death rate from disease was 0.6 per thousand, compared with 14.1 per thousand during World War I. . . . medical science during World War II brilliantly succeeded at what it was asked to do. The success of the war on disease stands as an important corrective to the widespread misperception that American medical science was immature prior to the postwar expansion of the National Institutes of Health” (Ludmerer, 132-33).