Maartje Abbenhuis reviews Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly by Mark Derby:
‘ACADEMIC HISTORIANS rarely write well, or rather, many of us do write well but we rarely write page-turning, edge-of-your-seat histories of the ‘I wonder what will happen next’ kind. This is, in part, because we rarely have access to the source materials to be able to fill in enough of the historical detail to take the reader on a magical journey. It is also because we have been trained to write for an academic audience, employing a language that often distances us from our subjects and from those who read our work. As an academic historian, trained in the art of academic communication, it was a genuine treat and pleasure to read this book and to be taken on a page-turning journey through the life of an extraordinary person, namely that of Dr Douglas Jolly. The book is beautifully crafted. It is also an excellent piece of academic history, replete with the necessary footnotes and an exceptional array of primary sources.
Biography is a particularly difficult historical medium, not least as the art of curating what to include in the story of a person’s life and, thus, what to exclude, is difficult. How to remain true to the complex person that was Douglas Jolly and how to give fullness to his professional achievements requires careful balancing, an act well-managed by Mark Derby. Without be-labouring any one aspect, Derby takes us through the milestones of Jolly’s life, from growing up in Te Wai Pounamu town of Cromwell, to receiving his medical training at the University of Otago, to his choice to move to England to pursue various surgical residency opportunities in 1932.
As any modern historian knows, after 1932 Europe became a hotbed of political tension, contestation, and, ultimately, war. Although he could not have known it before he left for the United Kingdom, Jolly quickly found himself at the beating heart of London’s Christian socialist movement, whose primary aim was to resist the power and spread of European fascism. This ideological commitment to anti-fascism led Jolly to join the British Medical Volunteers Unit of the International Brigade in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In his role as a battlefield surgeon, Jolly not only excelled in providing medical care to his patients but also pioneered a range of medical interventions that altered military surgical and first-aid practices. He saved numerous lives, both personally and as his three-tiered battlefield triaging system was widely adopted. He served in Spain for two years, and on his return to London in 1938, he vociferously advocated for changes to be made in British military medicine, including authoring a treatise on battlefield surgery that remained a standard text for many years, and one still in use during the Vietnam War. Jolly served as a medical doctor in Northern Africa and Italy throughout the Second World War. His early career was one of service to the anti-fascist cause and to the medical profession’s ethos to save lives. He weathered these years with enormous amounts of (at times) endless energy, while enduring great trauma in the process.’
Read the rest of the review here.
