Great War. Small, Bracing, Shows

War appears to have a big upside for medicine and the arts – at least graphic poster arts.

That’s an idea, but not the only one, that emerges from two small exhibitions that Yale University is mounting to mark the centennial of the War to End All Wars.

“Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917” and ​“Refugees, Immigration, and Library Books for Soldiers: A Selection of World War I Posters” are on view in the corridor and in the rotunda of the John Hay Whitney Medical Library over on Cedar Street at the medical campus.

The roughly dozen posters, from a collection of many more, demonstrate how the format truly came into its own here in the form of large-size and beautiful graphic appeals from non-profits to give food and relief to refugees, and even library books for the troops. The show runs through Apr. 25.

The second exhibition is mainly of paper ephemera — letters, diaries, books — along with objects of war, including a helmet and chunk of shrapnel from a 1914 bombing of the Reims, France Cathedral to help illustrate how new brain surgery techniques developed from the onslaught and the carnage. This second show, which is in the rotunda of the library, goes through May 12.

One of the organizers of the exhibition, medical librarian Melissa Grafe, said she was particularly drawn to a poster advertising the work of the American Relief Committee in the Near East in part because of the unfortunate resonance today. (Others who curated the exhibition include medical librarian Susan Wheeler and graduate student Maria Rios.)

The poster for the group, which in its 15-year history raised $117 million, pointedly identifies non-Muslim victims of war and starvation in order to appeal to Christian American donors.

“The topic’s horrible, but the connection to today makes me excited about this one,” she said.

Then, as now, a striking woman or a starving, suffering child was often the centerpiece of the graphic campaign.

And there was no shame in lifting material from a French poster — the women plowing the field themselves in the absence of draft animals — in order to appeal to the women of Connecticut to contribute food and money toward the World War I effort and to some of the wartime food shortages in the United States.

The insight of the rotunda, where ​“Yale Goes To War, 1917” unfolds in vitrines chock full of books, letters, and ledgers, is that war, as horrible as it is, is also sometimes a crucible for innovation, as it was in the case of a neurosurgeon treating lots of head wounds.

The surgeon in question is Harvey Cushing, after whom the library is named.

Collections of his diaries during his time running a French hospital in World War I are, with hindsight, almost naive in their descriptions of the inadequacy of the newfangled metal helmets to protect the head against the increasingly lethal weaponry being unleashed.

Cushing and his team had to become inventive in how to treat head injuries that contained shrapnel. He invented a magnet that would draw to it pieces of shrapnel embedded in the brain, a technique that reduced or minimized the damage the surgeon himself might cause in poking around to extract elusive shell fragments.

Other materials illustrate how Yale docs associated with the Yale Mobile Hospital No. 39, the first such unit deployed during the war, took the lessons they learned from studying the pathologies produced when soldiers inhaled poison gas to help overcome the great influenza pandemic that struck shortly after the war ended in 1918.

At least one major exhibition — in the planning process at the Knights of Columbus Museum — will be marking the centennial of the Great War. Both these smaller exhibitions are a bracing way to begin.

Both are open to the public, but you need to show ID to enter the medical library.

“Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917” and ​“Refugees, Immigration, and Library Books for Soldiers: A Selection of World War I Posters” are on view in the corridor and in the rotunda of the John Hay Whitney Medical Library, 333 Cedar St.