Medicine, Conflict and Survival
ISSN: 1362-3699 (Print) 1743-9396 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmcs20
Among the Dying Michael Pountney To cite this article: Michael Pountney (2015) Among the Dying, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 31:2, 130-131, DOI: 10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453
Published online: 25 Feb 2015.
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Date: 05 November 2015, At: 13:35
130
Book reviews
supports its main goal, which is to improve the health and well-being of military personnel, veterans and their families.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 13:35 05 November 2015
Jos Weerts Former Head of the Department of Expertise and Research, Veterans Institute The Netherlands [email protected] © 2015, Jos Weerts http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014138
Among the dying, by Leo van Bergen, Deventer, Netherlands, Dulce & Decorum, 2014, 90 pp., €19.90 (hardback), ISBN 9789089600165 Fiction is not a category of book that we usually review, but this small book by Leo van Bergen is special. It is the 15th title in the Library of the First World War, published in the Netherlands by Dulce & Decorum (http://www.dul ce-et-decorum.nl/). And it is fiction. Dr van Bergen will be familiar to readers of Medicine Conflict and Survival as a frequent book reviewer and recently as Guest Editor of our special issue (Vol. 30, No. 4) on First World War. The book is made up of 25 vignettes, each focusing on a different facet of the war. Many of these two-to-three page vignettes are about medical issues, on which Dr van Bergen is an expert, for example about being injured, about collecting the injured and getting them to a dressing station, about being a woman wanting to be allowed to work as a nurse on the front line, about psychological damage and its effects on your family when you are on leave and about not knowing what you will look like after a long series of reconstructive operations. Others focus on a wide and often startling range of subjects, from the absence of grand cemeteries for German soldiers (they are ‘no less missing, no less dead’), what it is like to be a prostitute (for some of her clients ‘it may be the first, and if they’re unlucky, even the only time that they have a bit of fun), to cowardice (‘Do I want a blindfold? Of course I want a blindfold … Godammit they actually sentenced me for cowardice to begin with!’). All the pieces are first-person monologues, and Dr van Bergen skilfully conveys the mood of the speakers – anger, resignation, fear, boredom and panic. Sometimes the translation from Dutch is not entirely fluent but that is not a serious flaw. There are some evocative black and white illustrations by Henk Fakkeldij and a Preface by Diederik van Vleuten setting the book in its context.
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
131
For anyone interested in this war, or in warfare, this small book, through its fictional form, gives some interesting insights into those terrible years that cannot be easily conveyed through factual studies.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 13:35 05 November 2015
Michael Pountney Medicine Conflict and Survival, London michael@thetopflat.com © 2015, Michael Pountney http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453
First World War nursing: new perspectives, edited by Allison S. Fell and Christine E. Hallett, New York/London, Routledge, 2013, 226 pp., £80.46 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-83205-2 The history of medicine, and certainly the history of medicine in war, is dominated by male doctors. This fact alone completely justifies the publication of First World War Nursing, edited by Allison S. Fell, who has published widely on women and war, and Christine E. Hallett, author of a standard work on war nursing: Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War. First World War Nursing consists of 10 separate articles, nine of them divided into three chapters: ‘national identities’, ‘professional identities’ and ‘nurse as witness’. In national identities, the equivalents and differences between the views of nurses on nursing in the 1914–1918 war are central. How was the perception of nursing influenced by national values? It is suggested that in France, the perception was partly shaped by tales told at the end of the nineteenth century about heroic nursing during the Franco-Prussian war. The three articles on ‘professional identities’ focus on the distinction between professional nurses and volunteer ‘amateur’ nurses well known in Britain as VADs. In the third part, phrases such as ‘naked body’, ‘male patients’, ‘female nurses’ and ‘pain and anguish’ come up time and again. How was the work of nursing influenced by the fact that it was females with their bodies intact looking after men with their bodies broken and vice versa. Were they still men? And if they were not, could the nurses truly be women? In an afterword, dealing with remembrance, Allison Fell goes into the history of the changing societal view on First World War nursing; a view, in which the ‘Testament of Youth’ view of the often intellectual, almost always high-class and more or less pacifistic amateur nurse became dominant in spite of the fact that the amateurs owed their knowledge and training to the professionals. Resentment and tension were the result. It is one of the many merits of this book that it dispels the myth of a one-sided nursing view of war and of the hardships nurses had to see and endure. This takes me to the first of two tiny criticisms. Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte and Vera Britain are always the three most prominent names in books
ISSN: 1362-3699 (Print) 1743-9396 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmcs20
Among the Dying Michael Pountney To cite this article: Michael Pountney (2015) Among the Dying, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 31:2, 130-131, DOI: 10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453
Published online: 25 Feb 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 15
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmcs20 Download by: [University of Pennsylvania]
Date: 05 November 2015, At: 13:35
130
Book reviews
supports its main goal, which is to improve the health and well-being of military personnel, veterans and their families.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 13:35 05 November 2015
Jos Weerts Former Head of the Department of Expertise and Research, Veterans Institute The Netherlands [email protected] © 2015, Jos Weerts http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014138
Among the dying, by Leo van Bergen, Deventer, Netherlands, Dulce & Decorum, 2014, 90 pp., €19.90 (hardback), ISBN 9789089600165 Fiction is not a category of book that we usually review, but this small book by Leo van Bergen is special. It is the 15th title in the Library of the First World War, published in the Netherlands by Dulce & Decorum (http://www.dul ce-et-decorum.nl/). And it is fiction. Dr van Bergen will be familiar to readers of Medicine Conflict and Survival as a frequent book reviewer and recently as Guest Editor of our special issue (Vol. 30, No. 4) on First World War. The book is made up of 25 vignettes, each focusing on a different facet of the war. Many of these two-to-three page vignettes are about medical issues, on which Dr van Bergen is an expert, for example about being injured, about collecting the injured and getting them to a dressing station, about being a woman wanting to be allowed to work as a nurse on the front line, about psychological damage and its effects on your family when you are on leave and about not knowing what you will look like after a long series of reconstructive operations. Others focus on a wide and often startling range of subjects, from the absence of grand cemeteries for German soldiers (they are ‘no less missing, no less dead’), what it is like to be a prostitute (for some of her clients ‘it may be the first, and if they’re unlucky, even the only time that they have a bit of fun), to cowardice (‘Do I want a blindfold? Of course I want a blindfold … Godammit they actually sentenced me for cowardice to begin with!’). All the pieces are first-person monologues, and Dr van Bergen skilfully conveys the mood of the speakers – anger, resignation, fear, boredom and panic. Sometimes the translation from Dutch is not entirely fluent but that is not a serious flaw. There are some evocative black and white illustrations by Henk Fakkeldij and a Preface by Diederik van Vleuten setting the book in its context.
Medicine, Conflict and Survival
131
For anyone interested in this war, or in warfare, this small book, through its fictional form, gives some interesting insights into those terrible years that cannot be easily conveyed through factual studies.
Downloaded by [University of Pennsylvania] at 13:35 05 November 2015
Michael Pountney Medicine Conflict and Survival, London michael@thetopflat.com © 2015, Michael Pountney http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2015.1014453
First World War nursing: new perspectives, edited by Allison S. Fell and Christine E. Hallett, New York/London, Routledge, 2013, 226 pp., £80.46 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-83205-2 The history of medicine, and certainly the history of medicine in war, is dominated by male doctors. This fact alone completely justifies the publication of First World War Nursing, edited by Allison S. Fell, who has published widely on women and war, and Christine E. Hallett, author of a standard work on war nursing: Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War. First World War Nursing consists of 10 separate articles, nine of them divided into three chapters: ‘national identities’, ‘professional identities’ and ‘nurse as witness’. In national identities, the equivalents and differences between the views of nurses on nursing in the 1914–1918 war are central. How was the perception of nursing influenced by national values? It is suggested that in France, the perception was partly shaped by tales told at the end of the nineteenth century about heroic nursing during the Franco-Prussian war. The three articles on ‘professional identities’ focus on the distinction between professional nurses and volunteer ‘amateur’ nurses well known in Britain as VADs. In the third part, phrases such as ‘naked body’, ‘male patients’, ‘female nurses’ and ‘pain and anguish’ come up time and again. How was the work of nursing influenced by the fact that it was females with their bodies intact looking after men with their bodies broken and vice versa. Were they still men? And if they were not, could the nurses truly be women? In an afterword, dealing with remembrance, Allison Fell goes into the history of the changing societal view on First World War nursing; a view, in which the ‘Testament of Youth’ view of the often intellectual, almost always high-class and more or less pacifistic amateur nurse became dominant in spite of the fact that the amateurs owed their knowledge and training to the professionals. Resentment and tension were the result. It is one of the many merits of this book that it dispels the myth of a one-sided nursing view of war and of the hardships nurses had to see and endure. This takes me to the first of two tiny criticisms. Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte and Vera Britain are always the three most prominent names in books
