This paper takes a comparative approach to how the increasingly militarized male body was treated and seen when wounded, sick, or ill-prepared, ill-clothed, ill-equipped, and ill-maintained for battle in the Balkan Wars and WWI. As in other combatant nations, the numbers of wounded and ill in WWI provided a huge experimental pool demanding more advanced and rapid triage, as well as adaptable modes of treatment for bodies encountering new types of mental and physical wounds. Doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, such as the pharmacists who stepped in where there were no doctors, emerged from these two wars with more authority and legitimacy than they had before, including having wrested from military commanders more rights to treat the wounded. The massive numbers of conscripts, volunteers, and combatant and civilian casualties meant that this war came home vividly to more Ottoman subjects than previous wars. As a result, a rapidly changing discourse developed around the scope and type of casualties in various topographies of battle, and around the responsibility of ruling elites and commanders in the field for violence done to millions of bodies of all genders. Attention must be paid to the damage done to female and children’s bodies, and work by colleagues as well as primary sources from this author’s research on non-combatant bodies will be incorporated into the presentation to make it truly gender history rather than simply women’s or men’s history. Damage to the male body as part of changing conceptions of Ottoman and later Republican Turkish masculinity needs further exploration, however, and that is where we will focus, on problematizing the male body as a tool and an object of modern warfare, and how this resonated through gender identities during and after the war. This paper uses archival records of medical personnel, local and international media coverage of the war, professional journals of medical practitioners, as well as memoirs and photographs. It also incorporates recent scholarly publications (and scholarly internet resources such as http://www.1914-1918-online.net/) on the war in several languages to engage masculinity studies. These sources are analyzed with a mix of military, political, social, intellectual, art, aural, and gender history to give us a fuller conception of the physical realities and discourses of the damaged male body in a time of war.