The medical war: British military medicine in the First World War

摘要

When I first met Mark Harrison, about 20 years ago, he was already talking about the medical history he was going to write of the British army's battles during the Great War. Due to all kinds of circumstances - amongst them writing a medical history of Britain and the Second World War - it took him a while, but the result does justice to the waiting. From different perspectives Harrison looks at the military medical organization, the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), its results and problems on three different fronts (western, Dardanelles, Mesopotamia) and gives insight into preventive medicine on the western front and on the battle against malaria in Salonika, East Africa and the Middle East. He makes clear that different factors determine the success and failure of medical intervention, such as medical knowledge, climate, geography, possibility of transport to front and rear, relationships between medical and non-medical officers, the interest of non-medical officers in (the importance of) medicine in keeping up morale and fighting-strength, the possibilities of and attitude towards prevention, for instance by means of inoculation, and last but certainly not least, public scrutiny. It means that, as always, Harrison has a keen eye for societal, political, circumstantial and ideological influences on medical policy, and on the influence of manpower drainage on the introduction of certain controversial medical technologies and procedures. A nice example of this is the influence of the war on the 'battle' between the defeated protagonists of quinine as malaria prophylaxis and the victorious ones saying that eradication of the mosquito itself would be a far better strategy. A second example is the (perhaps never ending) discussion on how best (or most morally) to combat VD.