| Medical
Services |
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Few people today would question the moral
obligation of the state to provide the best
medical care for soldiers wounded or fallen
ill in defence of their country. Yet the role
of Canadian military medical practitioners
has been a dual one: during the Great War,
for example, the mission of the Canadian Army
Medical Corps was "to conserve manpower"
(Desmond Morton, When Your Number's Up, 1993,
p. 197). For doctors and other medical personnel
during the Second World War, fulfilling their
moral and professional responsibilities as
healers was only one side of the coin; limited
manpower resources made it equally important
that they do so sufficiently well to return
soldiers, sailors, and airmen to duty.
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Ruth
Sharpe, Winnipeg (with tray) and
Jean Byam, Saskatoon, in one of
the big wards of a Canadian General
Hospital, formed in Montreal and
now set up in a civilian hospital
and two schools in a town in Southern
Italy, February 1944. |
| Photo
by Dwight E. Dolan. Department
of National Defence / National
Archives of Canada, PA-130869. |
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| Suggested
Reading: |
•
Bill Rawling, Death Their Enemy: Canadian
Medical Practitioners and War, 2001.
• G.W.L. Nicholson, Seventy Years
of Service: A History of the Royal Canadian
Army Medical Corps, Ottawa, Borealis,
1977.
• Rita Donovan, As for the Canadians:
the Remarkable Story of the RCAF's "Guinea
Pigs" of World War II, Ottawa:
Buschek, 2000.
•Terry Copp and Bill McAndrew,
Battle Exhaustion: Soldiers and Psychiatrists
in the Canadian Army, 1939-1945, Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990.
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Canada in WWII
Medical
Research and New Methods of Treatment
