Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe

Fiona Reid begins and ends her latest book with a question that historians have been self-consciously addressing for at least three decades: Is war good for medicine? A bevy of work on various nations—and various conflicts, for that matter—has shown that wars and military forces have powerfully influenced health and health care in civilian societies, and considerations about health have shaped military institutions and campaigns, as well as wartime health services. Reid tackles the question by focusing not primarily on institutions, but on the experiences of individual soldiers, medical professionals and pacifist volunteers, who hailed from Britain, France and Germany. One of Reid’s central premises is that ‘by accounting for the men’s pain, their treatment and their care, we can get a sense of the social and emotional history of men at war’ (p. 18). She organizes her narrative, in part, by disease, offering insights about pervasive ailments—body lice, trench foot—that do not commonly appear in popular depictions of the First World War, but that will be familiar to any scholar of the conflict. Reid reports, for example, that men combating infestations of lice were not only physically uncomfortable, and challenged by the onerous task of getting rid of the vermin, but also ‘embarrassed’ and ‘disgusted with themselves’ to such an extent that some hesitated to seek care (pp. 50–1)

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