Healers, Helpers and Hospitals - 9781869192778

Now available for the first time in the US, this handsome boxed set of two volumes has a specialist interest only, but its exhaustive nature and clear prose will make it valuable for its readership. The author, JC (Kay) Williams (Chair of Neurosurgery, emeritus, U. of Cape Town, SA) is an amateur historian and founder of the Cape Medical Museum (SA). He has created a complete history of military medicine in the Anglo-Boer War in a narrative style, organized into topic-specific chapters and sections. This will be of interest to military historians and similar readers with a strong interest in the period, and to historians of technology and medicine. The author introduces the book by pointing out that the Anglo-Boer War pushed the creation of modern Western medicine in the same way WWI and II did, but at an earlier date and in a medically difficult climate and terrain. Britain's previous war, the Crimean, was marked by terrible medical and humanitarian disasters. As a result, many 20th-century medical advances began with the Anglo-Boer War, along with broad application of the Geneva Conventions and the Red Cross. He looks at medical developments on both sides of the war in great detail. This includes issues both on and off the battlefield. The book has a British-centered perspective, but includes a large amount of information on the Dutch/Boer side. The larger first volume focuses on war: Red Cross and international ambulance services, Geneva Conventions and treatment of POWs, hospitals, colonial medical services, transport of the wounded, and other medical arrangements. The second volume is organized medically, looking at types of weapons, wounds, and infections, the Cape Town plague, and diseases of the war, along with some remarkable individual stories. These include an early example of problems with military drug use (here, soldiers chewing cordite), and some accounts of specific folk remedies found to be effective in an era before antibiotics, a useful source of information in an era of antibiotic-resistant infections. Distributed in the US by International Publishers Marketing. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)