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Reviewed by:
  • Medic: Saving Lives from Dunkirk to Afghanistan
  • Stephen R. Manning, BSc(Hons)MB BCh(Hons)CBiol MIBiol MRCS(Eng)
John Nichol and Tony Rennell, Medic: Saving Lives from Dunkirk to Afghanistan. London, Penguin Books, 2009.

This highly readable book describes the roles of British doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel in times of conflict. The preface to the book grasps our attention with a realistic and vivid description of modern training for operational deployments. We are then quickly moved into the battle zones of Afghanistan and follow the story of a real casualty from entering battle, to being wounded, evacuated, treated at the field hospital, and returned to the UK. The descriptive terms used leave us little doubt of the nature of this man’s injuries. Words such as “fillet steak” and “hamburger,” make it possible for us to see in our minds what the surgeon is seeing on the operating table.

From the second chapter we take a step back in time and look at the history of British medical personnel at war. During the Napoleonic wars, the French medical services were superior to the British. It is also noted that the technology man requires to kill his fellow man advances more quickly than that required to heal. The experience of the First World War is briefly covered, although little medical advances were achieved during this conflict.

At the beginning of the third chapter, we realize just how unprepared for war the British Expeditionary Force really were in 1940. Surgeons had very little experience of treating modern battle casualties. Much of their training had focused on hygiene. A significant advance in 1940 was the setting up of a national transfusion service, the only one of its kind amongst the warring nations. Despite the best-laid medical plans of peace time, the medical services in France were quickly overwhelmed by the [End Page 416] scale of casualties and we are treated again to vivid accounts of injuries. Operation Dynamo (the retreat from Dunkirk) aimed to rescue a fighting force. The wounded, who could not be moved, were to be left behind. This left the doctors with a difficult choice. Who should be left and who should be evacuated? Who should stay behind to care for those not evacuated? For those who were left capture was inevitable. With death a possibility, few held much faith in the Geneva convention.

Chapter 4 takes us further afield to the Pacific theatre and war with Japan. Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva convention but had ratified a treaty on the protection of medics and the wounded. This was not well honoured and accounts of slaughter to medical staff and their patients are given.

Throughout the book we see accounts of medics putting patients’ needs before themselves, and in chapter 5 we see an example of the moral duty of a doctor to his patients despite the considerable risk to himself. We also learn that in the desert, the pre-war training on hygiene did pay off, and with British latrine plans the rate of sickness is half of that seen in the Wehrmacht. Such a drop in sickness rates may have influenced the fighting strength of the British Army.

Chapter 6 tells of some of the difficulties medical personnel faced operating in a field hospital environment. The lack of lighting makes wounds difficult to fully assess and an example is given of a man with what appeared to be a mortal wound at night, being found to have a more superficial injury in the day light. After the capture of a German field hospital it was found that conditions there were much worse. Chronic wounds were not treated, infection rates were higher, recovery times longer and penicillin absent. Could it have been that investment from the Nazi regime was greater for processes which destroy life than for those that could preserved the lives of its soldiers?

Chapters 7 and 8 tell another tale of extreme bravery and sacrifice under fire, the implications of the Nagasaki bomb on the future of warfare, and a large period of the twentieth century. It describes some of the advances made leading to the miraculous...

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