10 Everyday Inventions That Exist Thanks To War

A curious irony about medical technology is that to improve, it needs sick or injured people to test it on. Therefore for people to be fixed, a lot of people have to be broken first. And if you want a lot of broken people, you need to have a war.

Medical treatment of traumatic injury, burns and other horrible violations of the human form has relied on war to provide the test cases it needs to work with. A significant example is plastic surgery, which owes many of its techniques to the disfigurement by fire of Allied pilots during World War II.

'Doing a burn', or being trapped in a burning aircraft while bailing out, was a fate dreaded by pilots, especially because of the ruination it could cause to their faces. Pilots who suffered such burns formed the 'Guinea Pig Club' of patients undergoing experimental plastic surgery at the hands of surgeon Archibald McIndoe.

The influx of burn victims gave McIndoe the chance to develop techniques for reconstruction and skin grafts still used today.