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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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Medical
Research and New Methods of Treatment
