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Jun. 3rd, 2014 09:09 pmI recently read Emily Mayhew's Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I. It is awesome.
This is a book about logistics and practice - from a social history perspective! There's no emphasis on heroic feats of surgery or grand advances in technology. Instead it's a history of making a working community and a working medical practice under extremely adverse conditions.
It's not a heavily analytical book, and Mayhew balances her analysis with her evidence and narrative so deftly that I think it ends up feeling even less analytical than it actually is, but the arguments Mayhew does make are supported with a wealth of evidence. Mayhew has whole chapters on matters that often get reduced to a line - she has put together a really awesome account of the hospital trains, for one thing! I think my favorite bit is probably the chapter on litter bearers, although the reconstruction of hospice care is also amazing. It's all good though!
Obviously death and pain are major presences in this work. Mayhew deals with them extremely well. They're never trivialized, but there's none of that weird, voyeuristic sensationalism you sometimes get even in otherwise good and dryly academic texts. There are regular segments describing the evacuation and treatment chain from the perspective of individual people wounded at the front - these are probably the most graphic.
It's a fairly easy read too, and relatively short. I whole-heartedly recommend it, it's great, I wish there were more.
This is a book about logistics and practice - from a social history perspective! There's no emphasis on heroic feats of surgery or grand advances in technology. Instead it's a history of making a working community and a working medical practice under extremely adverse conditions.
It's not a heavily analytical book, and Mayhew balances her analysis with her evidence and narrative so deftly that I think it ends up feeling even less analytical than it actually is, but the arguments Mayhew does make are supported with a wealth of evidence. Mayhew has whole chapters on matters that often get reduced to a line - she has put together a really awesome account of the hospital trains, for one thing! I think my favorite bit is probably the chapter on litter bearers, although the reconstruction of hospice care is also amazing. It's all good though!
Obviously death and pain are major presences in this work. Mayhew deals with them extremely well. They're never trivialized, but there's none of that weird, voyeuristic sensationalism you sometimes get even in otherwise good and dryly academic texts. There are regular segments describing the evacuation and treatment chain from the perspective of individual people wounded at the front - these are probably the most graphic.
It's a fairly easy read too, and relatively short. I whole-heartedly recommend it, it's great, I wish there were more.
