Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and Their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660 (review)

This book is one of several recent volumes that explore caregiving to sick and wounded soldiers, as such arrangements have been shaped by the interplay of peacetime and wartime societies (Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, 2001; Patrick Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans' Welfare State 1860-1900, 1997; among others). Since many of these studies tend to focus on modern conflicts, Justice to the Maimed Soldier is most welcome for its chronological scope, for encouraging comparisons between early-modern and modern arrangements, and for its effort to recover the history of British military nursing before the work of Florence Nightingale.

Eric Gruber von Arni, who is the official historian of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, aims chiefly to provide "a balanced assessment of the nature, form, availability, quantity and quality of casualty care in the years that saw the gestation of the British standing army" (p. 16). In pursuit of this goal, he marshals thorough research in several case studies to compare the caregiving measures adopted by the king and his Council of War, on the one hand, and those by Parliament, on the other. The Royalist army displayed lukewarm commitment to its casualties as a result of an autocratic command structure that assumed that "regimental commanders would adopt a responsible approach towards their sick and wounded," which led commanders to "[pay] only lip service to formulating a centrally co-ordinated casualty care policy" (p. 21). This approach, Gruber von Arni concludes, "was a direct reflection of pre-war society's approach to community benevolence which separated itinerants and the impotent poor from society, keeping them out of sight and out of mind," and "fulfilled its obligations to the needy by establishing charitable almshouses" (p. 34). Parliament, for its part, adopted an approach that was in direct contrast to the Royalist case. Empowered by concern for the "Commonweal" and control of an efficient and coordinated organization—including access to London's poor hospitals, financial resources, and the support of the College of Physicians, the Surgeons' Company, the City's liveried companies, and London's merchants— Parliament accepted "full centralized responsibility for those killed or incapacitated in its service" (p. 34).

Noteworthy in the narrative of these differences is Charles II's repudiation of social policies introduced during the Protectorate. The Restoration brought the denial of pension petitions from ex-soldiers of Parliamentary armies in favor of those from men who had served in Royalist armies. It also brought the cessation of the granting of pensions to the widows and orphans of ex-soldiers, a measure that was not reestablished for more than two decades (p. 87). Gruber von Arni's conclusions in this regard are especially helpful as they assist in revealing further continuity and change in the underexamined history of disabled veterans and their families.¹ Analyses of war in Ireland and Scotland, maritime and overseas casualty care, and wartime nursing personalities, alongside more than a dozen detailed tables, give wonderful richness to this book and offer specialists in the era, and in the history of medicine specifically, opportunities to paint a more detailed picture of early modern caregiving for soldiers and civilians alike.

The outstanding chapter of this book is the eighth, in which Gruber von Arni uses extant source material to draw a comprehensive yet speculative picture of contemporary treatments and daily life in hospital wards. Spiritual welfare, institutional diets, beds, and clothing receive attention here, as do herbalist remedies for common soldiers' ailments. He also provides valuable insight into the services of "bone setters" employed to straighten fractured limbs, and of hospital carpenters charged with making...