How Did Physicians Treat Victims Of The Demon Core Exposure?

I’m the kind of person who reads medical histories between manga chapters, and when I think about how doctors handled the demon core incidents I see two eras colliding. Back then, treatment was essentially emergency care plus watchful waiting: remove the patient from the source, decontaminate externally, give fluids and pain relief, treat burns and infections, and transfuse blood when counts fell. Physicians monitored blood counts closely because lymphocyte and platelet drops signaled worsening exposure, but they lacked the targeted therapies we have now.

If a similar exposure happened today the approach would add several tools: rapid dosimetry and biodosimetry to estimate dose, aggressive decontamination and decorporation for actinides (DTPA for plutonium/am) if internal uptake is suspected, and supportive drugs like G-CSF to stimulate white cell recovery. We’d consider hematopoietic stem cell transplant in selected, severe cases, use broad-spectrum antibiotics preemptively when neutropenia is deep, and apply specialized wound care and pain management. There’s also more coordination now between radiation safety officers and trauma teams, and psychological support is standard.

Thinking about it makes me grateful for advances in both medicine and safety culture — the old reports are haunting, but they also pushed pioneers to develop the tools we rely on today.

I dug into this because the story of those criticality accidents always felt like a grim little chapter of Cold War science — and the way physicians reacted at the time tells you a lot about how medicine meets the unknown. When Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin were exposed, the immediate response was basic emergency care layered over painstaking radiation monitoring. Teams first moved the men away from the source, removed clothing that might be contaminated, and washed skin thoroughly while using Geiger counters and film badges to check for external contamination. Doctors and health physicists worked together: the physicists tried to quantify dose with badges, film, and blood tests, while the physicians focused on symptom control and preventing infection once the bone marrow began to fail.

Treatments were largely supportive and reactive. Both men developed acute radiation syndrome — nausea, vomiting, severe burns in irradiated tissues, and progressive loss of white blood cells. Physicians gave fluids, pain control (morphine and other analgesics), antibiotics to chase opportunistic infections, and transfusions when blood counts dropped. Wound care was carried out for irradiated or burned skin; isolation and strict hygiene were emphasized because an irradiated patient’s immune defenses were collapsing. There weren’t targeted anti-radiation drugs then for internal contamination, and hematopoietic growth factors didn’t exist, so doctors were limited to transfusions and palliative measures when the marrow stopped producing cells.

What always gets me is the human side — the medical teams were trying their best with incomplete knowledge. Slotin’s agony and Daghlian’s decline were documented with clinical notes that show careful monitoring of temperature, blood counts, and wound infections as they progressed to multi-system failure. Contemporary physicians tried novel things when possible, but many modern interventions (cytokine support, bone marrow/stem cell transplants, specific chelators for transuranics) weren’t available yet. Reading the reports over a coffee in the archives, I felt both respect for those clinicians and a chill at how much they were improvising. It’s a reminder that medicine evolves, and that those early tragedies shaped protocols that protect people today.