24th Canadian Field Ambulance Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps

The 24th Field Ambulance, Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, was the only complete Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario unit mobilized and sent overseas in the Second World War. Today few know its story in spite of an active veterans’ association. The purpose of this article is to pay tribute to the service and sacrifice of these extraordinary ordinary men who risked all when Canada was in peril

Naval Medical Operations at Kingston during the War of 1812

Throughout the War of 1812 the practice of naval medicine in Kingston (the headquarters of British naval forces on the Great Lakes) was beset with adversity. Dependent for years upon the army, the Provincial Marine’s medical resources were minimal, with problems increasing exponentially after the expansion of the Royal Navy’s forces on the lakes in early 1813. Naval surgeons in Kingston faced almost constant shortages of personnel, supplies and facilities, issues which were not fully resolved until the very end of the war. Yet although the standard of care under these conditions has earned a poor reputation in the past, naval medical officers in fact strove to ensure the comfort and recovery of their patients. This article follows the development of naval medical infrastructure in Kingston during the conflict, demonstrating that despite adverse circumstances the care provided was often both sophisticated and effective

Medical Care of American POWs during the War of 1812

In 2005, a service in Halifax commemorated US soldiers and sailors who perished in Britain’s Melville Island prisoner-of-war camp during the War of 1812 and whose remains now lie on Deadman’s Island, a nearby peninusla. The service culminated nearly a decade of debate, in which local history enthusiasts, the Canadian and American media, and Canadian and US politicians rescued the property from developers. The media in particular had highlighted the prisoners’ struggles with disease and death, often citing the sombre memoirs of survivors.1 Curiously, Canadian investigators relied largely upon American accounts and did little research on efforts at amelioration from the British perspective. Coverage has emphasized British cruelty, citing accounts of internees such as that edited by Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse (an American medical officer) and American deaths at the hands of guards at Dartmoor Prison in England during a riot in April 1815,2 while ignoring more positive elements, such as medical care. This article explores British medical care for American prisoners of war in terms of organization, delivery, treatments and results, and US observations of the matter. In fact, British medical authorities addressed problems in the custody system and provided humane and compassionate medical care. In the absence of international codes for the treatment of prisoners and substantial provision for handling thousands of prisoners of war, upkeep was difficult, rendering medical care often chaotic. British medical officers none the less cared for captives adequately and comparably to the way they assisted their own forces

Home Front to War Front: The Navy Nurse Corps During World War II

The Navy Nurse Corps was created in 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Naval Appropriations Bill. Twenty women were selected to become the corps’ first members. These women were referred to as the “The Sacred Twenty.” On December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Navy Nurse Corps, was one of the first groups to respond. These women were important in preventing further deaths following the attack. However the experiences of Navy nurses during World II are often left untold because their story is overshadowed by the Army Nurse Corps, which doubled in size during the war. However, not one person’s experience is typical. This paper tells the stories of the women in the Navy Nurse Corps during World War II, through the experiences of Dora Cline Fechtmann, Dorothy Still Danner, Mary Rose “Red” Harrington and other Navy nurses

Suicide and Attempted Suicide in the Royal Navy

A series of 162 cases of suicide over the last 13 years and of 315 cases of attempted suicide over the last 5 years in the Royal Navy have been collected for this study and have been analysed in detail. It has been shown that the ratio of suicide to attempted suicide in the Royal Navy is approximately 1 : 8. 5. Suicide has been shown to be little influenced by stressful situations in the Royal Navy; attempted suicide is however influenced by such situations. It has also been shown that the majority of attempted suicides in the Royal Navy are histrionic and self-directed aggressive acts, in which the element of an appeal for help amounting almost to blackmail in such a setting as the Navy, was well marked; the attempted suicide was expected to influence the patient's environment and not to produce death. It has also been shown that both suicide and attempted suicide tend to be concentrated in groups where aggressive tendencies must be carefully controlled. It is seldom encountered in groups in the service where aggression can be discharged, either directly as in conditions of active service or indirectly by frequent exposure to the risks of danger and death. No findings contrary to those already recorded by other workers on these subjects in relation to the various aspects of suicide and attempted suicide (for example, the increasing tendency to suicide with increasing age, the methods used etc.) have been demonstrated. Durkheim's original findings on suicide in military personnel have been confirmed. A hypothesis has been put forward, linking suicide and attempted suicide under Royal Naval conditions of service in an inverse ratio with the ability and opportunity to discharge aggressive drives. It has been suggested that suicide and attempted suicide are basically the same act, performed by different groups of people, depending ultimately on the relative development of instinctual drives and ego strength

Women as voluntary and professional military nurses in Great Britain, 1854-1914

After the Crimean War, civilian initiatives were largely responsible for introducing female nurses into military hospitals to supplement and supervise male orderlies. The early difficulties of the new nursing service were similar to those experienced by middle and upper-class women reformers of civilian hospitals. The first female corps was almost independent of military commandants and medical officers; 'lady superintendents' made unwelcome attempts to impose the social norms and work patterns of upper-class households. The medical officers achieved full authority over the female nurses only in 1885. Although reluctant to mobilise female nurses for colonial warfare, under pressure from civilian relief agencies army medical authorities did so after 1879. Army nurses were not prominent public figures; nevertheless, British and foreign war nursing attracted considerable civilian interest, and for some women became a symbol of their right to political participation and equal citizenship. The institution in 1883 of the first national decoration for women, the Royal Red Cross, further legitimated heroism in war as a female ambition. The Royal British Nurses' Association's attempt to form a military nursing reserve indicates that many trained nurses saw war service as conferring the public status necessary to their campaign for state registration. The manpower crisis of the Boer War 1899 - 1902 convinced officials that army hospitals required more female personnel; the success of subsequent drives to recruit trained nurses and voluntary first-alders as military reserve nurses and auxiliaries on the eve of World War I owed much to interests, enthusiasms and ambitions generated among women in the nineteenth century. The early history of British female army nursing demonstrates the influence of civilian expectations upon military institutions; developments at the turn of the century suggest that it was through military nursing that civilian women were militarised