The Great War of the Nurses: Doctors, Nurses and Stretcher Bearers from 1914-1918
Author Patrick Loodts
Isabelle Masson Loodts
Memory Editions
Very good condition
This 416-page work, now in B5 format, abundantly illustrated with often unpublished photographic documents (including many photos missing from the first edition), evokes in a detailed and original way the lives of the doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers involved in the Great War. Doctor Patrick Loodts was a military doctor before devoting himself to occupational medicine. He is also passionate about history, medical history and military history. The website he created several years ago to share the fruits of his research, as well as the numerous conferences he gave on the subject, have ensured him an obvious reputation among enthusiasts of the First World War. The complicity of his daughter Isabelle, a trained historian and journalist, offers us a work which certainly constitutes an essential and original contribution to the knowledge of life in the trenches and behind the front of what was pompously called the "Great War". With more than 9 million dead and 23 million wounded, the "Great War" will remain in history as one of its deadliest events. If the first world conflict ended in 1918 with a disastrous human toll, it is because the violence of the fighting was compounded by the use of new weapons: gas and shells were the cause of many deaths, but also of serious physical after-effects and profound psychological trauma. At the beginning of the war, the Belgian army's medical services proved insufficiently prepared for the influx of wounded caused by this war, which is readily compared to a slaughter. To help the gassed, the broken-faced, and other war traumatized, men and women rolled up their sleeves: teachers became stretcher-bearers, wives and mothers became nurses, priests and nuns no longer contented themselves with praying for men, but worked to care for their mutilated bodies… Medicine experienced many advances during this period, both technical and in the organization of health services on the front or in the training of nurses. Women, in particular, played a crucial role in this evolution, and thereby gained the first steps towards an autonomy and freedom that would continue to grow thereafter. The names of nurse Edith Cavell or Elisabeth of Belgium, the Nurse Queen, are firmly inscribed in the collective memory, alongside those of Doctor Depage, founder of the Ocean Hospital, or the British Doctor Chavasse, whose courage was rewarded with a double Victoria Cross. Many other names have been forgotten: the purpose of this book is to bring them back to light. Through this research on the doctors, nurses, and stretcher-bearers of the First World War, the little story, that of the men and women, their families, their loves, their ideals, and their suffering, joins the great History, that of Humanity, its follies, violence, and vicissitudes, but also its courage and its formidable potential to mobilize to care for and alleviate suffering.
