Allenby's Military Medicine: Life and Death in World Was I Palestine

摘要

In Altetiby's Military Medicine, Eran Dolev has missed an opportunity to fuse military history with medical history. With an overwhelming, though not exclusive, reliance on published sources, the former Surgeon-General of the Israeli Defence Forces has tried too hard to position the medical history of the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces (EEF) campaign in Palestine under General Edmund Allenby within its military context. The result is an account of the campaign that claims to incorporate its medical dimension but in reality touches on it too briefly. At 208 pages, Allenby's Military Medicinernis easily roo pages too short to achieve its goals. This conciseness frustrates the reader throughout, culminating in an epilogue (there is no separate 'conclusion') that is barely two and a half pages long (even here, half of one page is a direct quote from memoirs). This is all the more disappointing as the topic is clearly an interesting one that has received too little attention thus far. Notwithstanding the above, the book does contain some noteworthy insights, even if these tend to come towards the end of the narrative. The discussion of the attacking force's anti-malarial operations in Palestine during the final phases of the campaign, for example, clearly stands out.