Devilish Angels?

[George Armstrong Custer]

Or just a lack of compassion and training?

From The Times

April 26, 2008

Soldiers’ diaries reveal devilish side of First World War angels

By Russell Jenkins

Nurses inflicted pain upon wounded soldiers in the First World War to a scandalous degree, according to new research.

Military hospitals have traditionally been portrayed as havens run by caring, if overstretched, staff but fresh evidence suggests that the experience of patients was very different.

Diaries written by injured working-class soldiers from the Somme to Gallipoli have revealed how they silently endured brutal treatment by the female military nurses, surgeons, physiotherapists and stretcher-bearers during the Great War.

Surgeons became hated figures depicted in hospital magazines as “Captain Hack” or “Captain Scalpel”. The female physiotherapists were “perpetrators of pain who resembled drill sergeants rather than bedside nurturers”.

Ana Carden-Coyne, lecturer in war conflict studies at Manchester University, who has researched hitherto untapped material for her book Men in Pain, describes how untrained or inexperienced medical staff were recruited to frontline care. So extensive were the demands for orthopaedic rehabilitation as the wounded returned across the Channel that decorum was put to one side and for the first time women were allowed to manipulate the bodies of wounded young men. There was a belief that if their physiotherapy was not hurting, it was not working.

Dr Carden-Coyne said: “Women had power over the wounded body. They inflicted pain upon patients to a degree that was, at times, scandalous and ignited institutional struggles among medical authorities.”

One Australian private complained in his diary that he felt the need to “keep quiet” when his doctor probed two inches into his leg wound for a piece of loose bone “with all the instruments of torture”, including tongs.

Another soldier recalled his humiliation when a nursing sister unwrapped bandages from his amputated arm. He witnessed her “falling down laughing” because the muscle wastage had left it “the size of a child’s”. Dr Carden-Coyne, co-director of the university’s Centre for the Cultural History of War, said: “These journals and cartoons show that the heroic myths of sacrifice popular at the time are rather false: those who were injured fighting for King and country were poorly cared for.

“Military medical propaganda was about how well we cared for the wounded and that is acutely contradicted by this evidence. In contrast to the image of good patients frequently mentioned in published accounts of medical staff, these soldiers used the form of patient diaries to express their horror and resistance in secret.

“They recorded personal stories of pain and healing with an extraordinary level of detail, were very attached to the diaries and took them seriously. Each day they entered information about their wounds, medical staff, treatment, feelings, doubts, complaints about the lack of vocational training, or refusing therapeutic treatments and surgical interventions.”

She believes that the soldiers kept diaries to regain some control over their lives. In turn the authorities allowed some leeway over subversive cartoons in hospital magazines because they acted as a pressure valve.

“While there are examples of sympathetic relationships between nurses and patients, the system was often very brutal, and indeed some of the nursing staff were also quite brutal,” Dr Carden-Coyne said.

She added that “the wounded did not enter the heroic mythology of the war. They have been locked out of the discourse of commemoration.”

Wry testimonies of the long-suffering:

— Cartoons drawn by patients for fellow sufferers use gallows humour to depict incompetent surgeons and brutish nurses

— One shows a character called Surgeon Hack who saws his fingers off as he practises on a tree stump

— Hospitals are dehumanising factories where bodies are treated and repaired on a conveyor belt to be sent back to the front

— In one poem, Captain Scalpel blows an even larger hole into a shell wound. Though the patient “howled like a pup and shrieked like an eight-inch howitzer, Captain Scalpel said: ‘All is well’ ”

— Female physiotherapists were instructed that massaging of amputated limbs had to be forceful to work and “blows should be sharp and quick but not heavy enough to bruise”. In one hospital a nurse broke a patient’s shoulder bone

— A soldier complained that, in contravention of the procedure of the Royal Army Medical Corps, he had been left to arrange his own leg splint

— Another recorded that staff at a hospital back home made him change his own dressings. The philosophy was “kill or cure”

— He wrote: “In the last hospital I would have been in serious trouble if I tried to touch the bandage or the wound and now here I am being told to soak my leg in the bath and then the dirt and stuff under the plaster will run down over the wound. If the wound gets poisoned the chance of loosing [sic] my leg is big”

[dutchbarge]

Sounds like a VA hospital. Cheers, Bill

[ericwebb]

Yes well ... !

I daresay Dr. Carden-Coyne can justify her allegations - although I'd like to go through her 'orginal sources' and her use of those rather carefully - but this sounds like the kind of sensationalist 'history' we can do best without. I've little doubt there were a few who abused their position through real ill-will and rather more who were incompetently stupid, or stupidly incompetent. It's much the same in medicine and nursing today and probably always will be. I've also no doubt at all that the vast majority were dedicated and caring. Patients in pain and distress - hence also very possibly under the influence of powerful narcotics - can misinterpret their experiences.

Wonderful too what you can do with selective use of evidence if you're after a headline.

See http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectar...anacardencoyne/

I leave it to others to judge that CV

Dr Eric Webb

[keithfazzani]

One line out of context quotes do little to forward an argument.

[George Armstrong Custer]

The Times' article contained nothing to justify the sub-headline of their piece:

'Nurses inflicted pain upon wounded soldiers in the First World War to a scandalous degree, according to new research. '

Eric's link to the CV of the originator of this proposition says it all, really. An academic career forged out of a weird conglomeration of the politically correct pseudo-social science disciplines which have mushroomed in history departments over the past two decades. Keith has hit the nail on the head as far as their methodolgy is concerned - out of context quotes, carefully selected to give the appearance of underpinning the author's pre-conceived notions are the stock-in-trade of such 'historians'.

ciao,

GAC

[centurion]

I'd refer members to "A Yank in the Trenches" the memoirs of an American who served in the British Army and was invalided out after the Somme (in which he accompanied one of the first tank attacks). He describes his experiences in British hospitals. Of the doctors he could possibly be summed up as saying eager to help but desperately inexperienced (there may not have been enough experienced doctors to go around) but cannot praise the nurses too highly - it was their attention he says that saved his arm when the doctor was advising amputation (probably the safest option if you aren't that experienced).

He does appear to have suffered a lot of pain but one must remember that the science of anesthesia and pain relief and the armoury of treatments available was very limited (very little in the way of local anesthetic fir instance). Morphia (sometimes in the form of heroin) was about the only effective pain killer and one cannot just keep pumping that in. Quite a number of men on both sides ended the war as addicts (including a certain overweight German pilot called Herman for instance).

[Bob Bedward]

Hello - I would suggest that a reading of the absolutely splendid Scarlet Finders site by the Forums own Sue Light which includes the brilliant transcript of the war diary of Emma Maud McCarthy

Matron-in-Chief with the British Expeditionary Force, France and Flanders, 1914-19.

Such a reading will give a clearer understanding of the intensity of organisation and administration involved.Perhaps more appositely to this subject is the humanity and care for the patients that pervades the work of this amazing woman.

My own research has thrown up many examples of letters from nurses/vads who whilst angry at the horror of the war describe the care for their patients given at all levels. Nor should we ignore the courage shown at CCS, Base hospitals, Ambulance Trains, Barges etc.

Or on a minor personal note the postcard sent by my grandfather from Reading War Hospital about his treatment following his gassing, praising his care and treatment

Old Jack

[David Filsell]

That CV scares me to death!