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osprey_archerI didn’t exactly intend Jeffrey Reznick’s Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War and Christine E. Hallett’s Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War to make a set, but it turns out that Hallett’s book is in many ways a rebuttal of Reznick’s, so they go well together.
Basically, Reznick’s theory is that the soldiers found the hospital system an extension of the brutalizing, dehumanizing process of the war, which defined soldiers as mere cog wheels within a system of destruction, while Hallett argues that in fact the hospitals were meant to put soldiers back together and in a sense rehumanize after their brutalizing experiences on the front.
Hallett may have an unfair advantage with me purely because I read her first (and also because Hallett would never use a phrase like “rationalization-anarchy-madness” to describe anything) but on the whole I found her more convincing. Naturally the hospitals didn’t always succeed, but it seems a bit much to define them as merely an extension of the rationalization-anarchy-madness of the front when the soldiers often professed themselves giddy with relief to be at the hospital and not the front. They clearly saw a difference between the two!
Reznick’s main evidence seems to be that the soldiers complained incessantly about the hospitals in the hospital magazines (the big hospitals all seem to have had their own magazines. A lot of the trenches did too, apparently) - the lousy institutional food, the incessant bed-making, the ever-blasting gramophones, etc. I just feel it’s a big leap from “soldiers complained about the hospitals!” to “the hospitals were brutalizing!” because… have you met humanity? Do you know how much humans like to complain? If there was nothing to complain about that, in itself, would probably become a grievance to us.
And Reznick himself notes that reminiscences about time in the hospital are often quite rosy, which he dismisses with the comment that soldiers “were quick to forget the worst aspects of the period,” but I really feel that this is a telling point only if they wrote in a similarly rosy manner about the trenches in their memoirs. If their memories of the hospital are rosy, and their memories of the trenches are not, doesn’t that also tend to point to an important difference between the two?
On a more practical note (for a writer of historical fiction, anyway), Hallett’s book has much more interesting minutia about the actual lived experience of the hospital wards. Lots of good information about way things could go wrong, both medically (gas gangrene, tetanus, “septic finger,” which often afflicted doctors and nurses, who had to handle all these horrible infected wounds with their bare hands - there simply weren’t gloves to go around) and otherwise - the heat and dust and flies that infested certain hospitals, especially ought near Gallipoli. The Gallipoli hospitals were almost constantly running out of supplies, too: the campaign was supposed to be easy and instead it was gruesome and London didn’t catch on for months and months.
One detail of interest in Reznick’s book: it was common for men to keep vases of wildflowers on their lockers. If they were well enough, they picked the flowers themselves, or nurses would bring them in. In Wounded Mayhew noted that when the hospital trains stopped - as they did often; they had the lowest priority, and often had to stop to let munitions or troop trains past - the nurses often rushed to gather flowers to bring a little brightness to the wounded men.
Basically, Reznick’s theory is that the soldiers found the hospital system an extension of the brutalizing, dehumanizing process of the war, which defined soldiers as mere cog wheels within a system of destruction, while Hallett argues that in fact the hospitals were meant to put soldiers back together and in a sense rehumanize after their brutalizing experiences on the front.
Hallett may have an unfair advantage with me purely because I read her first (and also because Hallett would never use a phrase like “rationalization-anarchy-madness” to describe anything) but on the whole I found her more convincing. Naturally the hospitals didn’t always succeed, but it seems a bit much to define them as merely an extension of the rationalization-anarchy-madness of the front when the soldiers often professed themselves giddy with relief to be at the hospital and not the front. They clearly saw a difference between the two!
Reznick’s main evidence seems to be that the soldiers complained incessantly about the hospitals in the hospital magazines (the big hospitals all seem to have had their own magazines. A lot of the trenches did too, apparently) - the lousy institutional food, the incessant bed-making, the ever-blasting gramophones, etc. I just feel it’s a big leap from “soldiers complained about the hospitals!” to “the hospitals were brutalizing!” because… have you met humanity? Do you know how much humans like to complain? If there was nothing to complain about that, in itself, would probably become a grievance to us.
And Reznick himself notes that reminiscences about time in the hospital are often quite rosy, which he dismisses with the comment that soldiers “were quick to forget the worst aspects of the period,” but I really feel that this is a telling point only if they wrote in a similarly rosy manner about the trenches in their memoirs. If their memories of the hospital are rosy, and their memories of the trenches are not, doesn’t that also tend to point to an important difference between the two?
On a more practical note (for a writer of historical fiction, anyway), Hallett’s book has much more interesting minutia about the actual lived experience of the hospital wards. Lots of good information about way things could go wrong, both medically (gas gangrene, tetanus, “septic finger,” which often afflicted doctors and nurses, who had to handle all these horrible infected wounds with their bare hands - there simply weren’t gloves to go around) and otherwise - the heat and dust and flies that infested certain hospitals, especially ought near Gallipoli. The Gallipoli hospitals were almost constantly running out of supplies, too: the campaign was supposed to be easy and instead it was gruesome and London didn’t catch on for months and months.
One detail of interest in Reznick’s book: it was common for men to keep vases of wildflowers on their lockers. If they were well enough, they picked the flowers themselves, or nurses would bring them in. In Wounded Mayhew noted that when the hospital trains stopped - as they did often; they had the lowest priority, and often had to stop to let munitions or troop trains past - the nurses often rushed to gather flowers to bring a little brightness to the wounded men.
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Date: 2020-12-28 02:36 pm (UTC)Do you know how much humans like to complain? If there was nothing to complain about that, in itself, would probably become a grievance to us. --laughing and laughing, because this is so, SO true.
PS What is it about running out of supplies? I never knew until this pandemic how much of a factor that apparently is-- a lot of the time? Like I imagined it might be a thing in a backwater hospital or in a developing country, but apparently it's just way more common than that....
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Date: 2020-12-28 04:04 pm (UTC)Re: running out of supplies, it's amazing how much this kind of logistical thing gets ignored in planning, in histories, etc., when it really controls so much of what happens. (I'm not sure I expressed that very well.)
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Date: 2020-12-28 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 11:12 pm (UTC)When I was researching the early years of the Danvers State Hospital for [a story I am very proud of and care a lot about which is now stuck in publication hell thanks to plague], I was fascinated and touched to discover that its therapeutic regime was big into sunlight, flowers, being outside, doing occupational therapy, and other niceties which were simply considered good for people who had either temporarily broken down or were dysfunctional for life, in either of which cases they might as well have nice things to look at and a working postal service to send letters through. They had a hospital orchestra which played for dances. Dahlias were the Victorian symbol for madness, so they were used in a lot of the architecture and decoration. It was such a far cry from the snake pit of its later reputation, I wanted to shake the twentieth century. Like, Dr. Kirkbride was wrong in his belief that the majority of mental illness was curable in the same way as physical injury, but he wasn't wrong in his belief that people could heal from trauma or just be more stable in a supportive environment, he was light-years ahead of the prevailing conceptions of sanity and insanity in the mid-nineteenth century, and either way his approach of compassion regardless of cause has it all over, er, most of our current healthcare system.
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Date: 2020-12-29 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-29 08:07 pm (UTC)Exactly!
(After this year? I could use a dance band.)
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Date: 2020-12-29 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 04:20 pm (UTC)Aww, jeez.
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Date: 2020-12-28 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-28 06:50 pm (UTC)