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Book Reviews
| Melissa Larner, James Peto, and Nadine Monem, eds, War and Medicine (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2008). ISBN 978-1906155520. 256 pp.
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| Serving as a companion volume to the Wellcome Trust's current exhibition of the same name, this book is something of a chimaera. Chronologically, it spans conflicts from the Crimean to the Iraq wars, but the coverage is patchy. Key episodes in the development of wartime disease prevention—such as the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the South African War of 1899–1902—are neglected, as is the Spanish Civil War, which saw the first widespread use of sulpha antibiotics and blood banks. Thematically, the focus is largely on the battlefield and the rehabilitation of wounded personnel. There is thus little mention of the medical consequences of war for civilian populations, from the 1918–19 influenza pandemic to anthrax scares within the current 'war on terror.' Indeed, the entire volume focuses exclusively on the treatment and care of wartime casualties, largely ignoring the role of biomedical research as an aid to military efficiency via personnel selection, maintenance of nutrition, hygiene, and immunisation, or the refinement of weapons technologies such as chemical munitions, land mines, or battlefield lasers. |
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Organisationally, too, War and Medicine alternates between essay collection and exhibition catalogue. It is a highly visual volume, reproducing numerous well-chosen images ranging from ECG traces to postcards, propaganda posters to surgical photographs. I was particularly taken by Hugh Small's reading—on page 35—of Florence Nightingale's graphs as a rhetorical form of 'visual poetry' within the Royal Commission report into Crimean War mortality. Likewise, a World War I photograph of wounded soldiers being evacuated on overhead railings resembling those found in butchers' shops (p. 69) aptly illustrated the theme of Ana Carden-Coyne's essay, 'Soldiers' bodies in the war machine.' In fact, the pictures form the strongest element of this book and reward careful consideration, although it is a shame that more images from the exhibition—particularly the post-World War I paintings by Otto Dix and George Grosz—are not included. |
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The text sections intersperse essays with personal accounts from nurses, doctors, and combat veterans, including British, American, North Vietnamese, and Iraqi sources. These contributions are—perhaps deliberately—quite uneven, as are the essays. For instance, writing from a German perspective, Susanne Hahn resists the trend for victors to portray conflict as a stimulus for medical advances, outlining instead the devastating effects of World War I on medical training, staffing, and ethics. Wolfgang U. Eckart's analysis of medical aspects of the Stalingrad siege offers a more conventional narrative, but has surprisingly little to say with regard to psychological casualties. Conversely, Ben Shephard—an expert on military psychiatry—contributes an extremely tendentious piece decrying the construction of posttraumatic stress disorder in the wake of the Vietnam War. Apparently overlooking the enormous body of US psychiatric research that arose from World War II, Shephard claims that American psychiatrists forgot the European lessons of the first half of the century, painting unflattering portraits that border on libel; for instance: 'Large numbers of people with no direction in life began retraining as "trauma counsellors"' (p. 174). While the introductory overview by military medicine doyen Mark Harrison is uninspiring, Joanna Burke's essay enlisting medical experiences across both world wars forms an excellent prototype for adapting recent scholarly research for a wider audience. |
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It is difficult to place this volume with regard to readership. The text is obviously written for a broad audience with little background knowledge of the history of military medicine. As such, War and Medicine offers little to challenge or surprise historians with an established interest in the field. However, while the occasional typographical or factual errors can be diverting, the images are well reproduced, providing a rich source of visual evidence. These numerous illustrations—coupled with the diversity of written contributions—suggest this book as a stimulating if incomplete primer for students new to military and/or medical history. |
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| PETER HOBBINS
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| UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY |
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