Bugs and Bullets

Joseph Breckinridge-Bayne was an American physician whose memoir recounts two years spent fighting disease and epidemics in Romania, all while living through the violence of war on the Eastern Front, behind enemy lines. He first served at a military hospital in Bucharest, and then carried his medical work into rural villages near the capital, where illness and famine had taken hold.

After the armistice, Bayne went back to Romania as a member of the Red Cross to help bring under control a typhoid epidemic. His account offers a distinctive view of everyday life in Romania during the First World War.

The volume includes an introduction by Ernest H. Latham, Jr., which covers Bayne's life and work, and the text has been edited and expanded. It will interest readers curious about medical conditions during World War I and about life on the Eastern Front.