This book illuminates how crucial transformations in medical politics and organisation were linked to wider changes in society, economy and ideology. Paying particular attention to developments in medical welfare for physically handicapped children, wounded soldiers and injured workers, this extensively documented study challenges conventional accounts of medical specialisation; provides Anglo-American comparisons; and demonstrates the importance for medical modernity of changing interactions between philanthropy, war, labour, capital and the state.

Although a young doctor when he volunteered for the Spanish Civil War in late 1936, New Zealander Douglas Jolly swiftly acquired a reputation as one of the most gifted and energetic surgeons of the Republican Army’s medical services. Over the next two years he performed countless life-saving operations on wounded combatants from both sides of the conflict, as well as on civilians. Tireless, dedicated, and courageous, he developed significant and innovative treatment systems based on the principle of working as near as possible to the front line. Jolly used this unprecedented battlefield experience to write a manual that was widely used in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Frontline Surgeon traces Jolly’s remarkable career from medical training in 1920s New Zealand, postgraduate study during the rise of fascism in Europe, almost a decade of frontline surgery, and into civilian life as medical director of Britain’s largest hospital for amputees. One of the greatest war surgeons of the twentieth century, Jolly has been mysteriously omitted from the ranks of pioneers of modern medicine. This engaging biography, intensively researched in many countries, both explains and redresses that omission.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

"The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional atrists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gelhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. It spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. New aircraft, weapons, tactics, and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Progress also arose from the horror: doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and frontline blood tansfusion. Rhodes takes us into the battlefields, bomb shelters, and hospitals; into the studios of artists; and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters, showing how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever." --

This book focuses on an important but neglected aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the evolution of medical and surgical care of the wounded during the conflict. Importantly, the focus is from a mainly Spanish perspective – as the Spanish are given a voice in their own story, which has not always been the case. Central to the book is General Franco’s treatment of Muslim combatants, the anarchist contribution to health, and the medicalisation of propaganda – themes that come together in a medico-cultural study of the Spanish Civil War. Suffusing the narrative and the analysis is the traumatic legacy of conflict, an untreated wound that a new generation of Spaniards are struggling to heal.