Excursions into Military Medical History

Katherine M Venables 

Professor Kate Venables is an Emeritus Reader in the Nuffield Department of Population Health and an Emeritus Fellow of St Cross College.  She qualified as a doctor from St Bartholomews Hospital in London and was a junior hospital physician before becoming a medical academic. After a Senior Lecturer post in Epidemiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College, she made a mid-career move to the University of Oxford. She has always written creatively, in parallel with her academic publications. Her poems and short stories can be found in various small literary journals and she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2022. Several military medical history publications came about as products of the research for the thesis, and she was pleased to be welcomed by the Oxford Medical Humanities community while writing these. 

Excursions into military medical history: battlefield surgery, naval nursing, doctor-PoWs, and prisoner art 

‘Do I count?’ I asked when an email arrived about the Medical Humanities early-career researcher writing group. I am a late-career occupational epidemiologist but I am also a ‘young’ researcher in the Humanities and have been fortunate in the welcome I have received from the Medical Humanities community in Oxford.  

When I ‘retired’ (a technical term for exchanging a salary for a pension but continuing to work as an academic) I vastly increased my non-medical writing. At first it was poetry and flash fiction in little literary magazines, then a Master’s and a PhD in life-writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, where my tutors included Blake Morrison, Francis Spufford and Frances Wilson. 

My interest in military medical history had in fact pre-dated my time at Goldsmiths and probably stemmed originally from childhood curiosity about the adults around me and their experiences in the Second World War. My father had been in a mobile surgical unit in the Burma Campaign, my mother was a naval nurse in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and ‘Uncle’ George (a family friend) was captured by the Japanese in Singapore and became the only doctor in one of the prisoner-of-war (PoW) camps in Taiwan. 

In the Goldsmiths PhD I discussed memoirs about a parent who died young and, for me, this involved reading around the medical aspects of the war against the Japanese and consulting primary documents in archives. As so often occurs, I found that the research generated more material than I could use in the thesis. A typical academic, my first thought was to shape the extra material into publishable forms, and the Journal of Medical Biography took a paper on battlefield surgery. Contacts with the Royal College of Anaesthetists led to a presentation and paper for the History of Anaesthesia Society. I transcribed my father’s letters from the war, wrote a contextualising history, and sourced a mixture of family photographs and images in the public domain, and this little book will be published later in 2025. 

Encouraged, I took a similar approach to my mother’s war, only to find that publishing about the history of naval nursing was a more difficult proposition. The paper has now found a home, but only after several journals turned it down. The lengthy reviews it attracted rather suggest that this may be an inward-looking field, often viewed through the prism of gender. Or maybe it is simply not a conventional paper. 

The most substantial piece of work was inspired by ‘Uncle’ George. I soon discovered that George Blair was one of the few Japanese PoW doctors whose wartime medical papers have survived. His extensive archive is in the Museum of Military Medicine, the Wellcome Archive, and the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) Headquarters Collection.i I noted that Taiwan is one of the under-researched places of wartime captivity, most literature in this field being about the Thai-Burma Railway, or the American camps in the Philippines. Furthermore, George’s younger brother, the late John Blair, had written a history of the RAMC, had set up an annual lecture in his brother’s name, and was still alive and happy to talk to me when I started the research.ii I decided not only to write a biographical article about George, but also to collect information about all the doctors who had been imprisoned on Taiwan.  

The Taiwan PoW doctors’ project showed that the characteristics of the 45 Allied doctors I identified gave insights into the more general experience of PoWs under the Japanese. Senior Allied figures such as generals and colonial governors had been sent from across the whole Indo-Pacific region to be imprisoned together in Taiwan. Some, of course, were doctors: Directors of Medical Services or Commanding Officers of military hospitals. Over one-third of the 45 doctors were senior figures from the Dutch, Australian, British and American forces. Another large sub-group were young American doctors for whom Taiwan was only a short stopover in a captive journey which involved the Philippines and, at the end of the war, Japan, Korea or Manchuria. George’s relatively static experience was unusual, but also meant that his records comprised a complete history of medical activities at one PoW camp over the almost three years of its existence. The project led to a substantial article in Medical History, as well as a lecture and conference presentations. I polished the Taiwan doctors’ article as a member of the Medical Humanities early-career researcher writing group and found other members with complementary interests, such as Kevin Noles and Rod Bailey.  

In the course of the research on Japanese PoWs, I met a group based at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) who, among other medical and historical projects, had curated an exhibition of PoW art which opened just as the COVID lockdown started. Meg Parkes from LSTM introduced me to the diaries kept by Gunner John Clement which were deposited in Glasgow City Archives.iii Clement was a commercial artist and kept meticulous illustrated diaries during his captivity: tiny, hand-made books with an entry for almost every day accompanied by a crayon sketch. The drawings have a cartoonish tone, which may have saved them from destruction by the guards. Their value for the medical historian lies not only in the completeness of their coverage but also in the fact that Clement was a PoW patient. His pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed while he was a PoW and he had a range of other ailments. His diaries deserve to be published, and they would make a wonderful project for a researcher with an interest in prisoner art. 

My years as a peripheral Medical Humanities researcher have been an interesting time for me and I hope that the resulting papers and book have a wider importance in Second World War military medical history than the simply personal. I had thought that this field was fully researched but I repeatedly discovered archives that had not been used by historians, or very little used. There is much more to explore, and the inclusive and open approach of the Medical Humanities community at Oxford is in my view the right approach for encouraging it.