Cocoanut Grove Fire - Advances in Burn and Psychiatric Care

Advances in Burn and Psychiatric Care

Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital took dozens of burn and smoke inhalation victims, and the event led to new ways of caring for both. Surgeons Francis Daniels Moore and Oliver Cope at Massachusetts General Hospital pioneered fluid resuscitation techniques for the burn victims, whose wounds were treated with soft gauze covered with petroleum jelly instead of tannic acid. The event was the first major use of the Hospital's new blood bank, one of the area's first.

Survivors of the fire were also among the first humans to be treated with the new antibiotic, penicillin. In early December Merck and Company rushed a 32-liter supply of the drug, in the form of culture liquid in which the Penicillium mold had been grown, from New Jersey to Boston. The drug was crucial in combating staphylococcus bacteria which typically infect skin grafts. As a result of the success of penicillin in preventing infections, the US Government decided to support the production and distribution of penicillin to the armed forces.

Erich Lindemann, a Boston psychiatrist, studied the families and relatives of the dead and published what has become a classic paper, Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief, read at the Centenary Meeting of The American Psychiatric Association in May 1944 and published in September of the same year. At the same time Lindemann was laying the foundation for the study of grief and dysfunctional grieving, Alexandra Adler was working with more than 500 survivors of the fire and conducting some of the earliest research on post-traumatic stress disorder.