Love and limblessness: male heterosexuality, disability, and the Great War

Tens of thousands of British men were permanently wounded as a result of war service. Their return home sparked debates about the wounded male body, female accountability for war-injuries, and the ideology, performance, and practice of masculinity. Other historians have shown how ‘broken heroes’ from the First World War were constituted into ‘men’ in four contexts: physical appearance, occupation, sport, and Britishness. This article explores a fifth dimension: sexuality. It explores debates about the need for war-disabled men to establish stable marital relationships and investigates some attempts to encourage this, including encouraging women to take the initiative in proposing marriage and the establishment of The League for the Marrying of Broken Heroes

Medicos, poultice wallahs and comrades in service: masculinity and military medicine in Britain during the First World War

The subject of British military medicine during the First World War has long been a fruitful one for historians of gender. From the bodily inspection of recruits and conscripts through the expanding roles of women as medical care providers to the physical and emotional aftermath of conflict experienced by men suffering from war-related wounds and illness, the medical history of the war has shed important light on how the war shaped British masculinities and femininities as cultural, subjective and embodied identities. Much of this literature has, however, focused on the gendered identities of female nurses and sick and wounded servicemen. Increasingly, however, more complex understandings of the ways in which medical caregiving in wartime shaped the gender identities of male caregivers are starting to emerge. This article explores some of these emerging understandings of the masculinity of male medical caregivers, and their relationship to the wider literature around the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between warfare and medicine. It examines the ways in which the masculine identity of male medical caregivers from the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps, namely stretcher bearers and medical orderlies, was perceived and represented both by the men themselves and those they cared for. In doing so it argues that total war played a crucial role in shaping social and cultural perceptions of caregiving as a gendered practice. It also identifies particular tensions between continuity and change in social understandings of medical care as a gendered practice which would continue to shape twentieth-century British society in the war’s aftermath