Eric Trump
Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly by Mark Derby (Massey University Press), 289pp, $45
‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it’.
—General Robert E. Lee, after the Battle of Fredericksburg
The flames of war have, for some, fired innovation, passion and purpose, even as they consume communities and sometimes nations. The New Zealand surgeon Douglas Waddell Jolly seems to have been someone who revelled in the transformative experience of battle, someone energised by the urgent and precarious moments he lived through in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Jolly was an inspirational figure and should have earned lasting fame for his pioneering medical service in both wars. His companions in Spain referred to him as ‘the best surgeon we had’ and ‘the most important volunteer to come from the British Commonwealth’. The world-renowned British surgeon Gordon Gordon-Taylor declared that ‘no surgeon of any race’ had done more abdominal surgeries than Jolly. In fewer than two years in Spain, Jolly treated more than 4000 wounded and performed nearly 1000 abdominal operations, often working by candlelight in caves or unused train tunnels.
Yet, as his comrades in arms went on to be knighted or pursue successful careers in medicine, Jolly was quietly forgotten. Only in 2018 was a small plaque commemorating Jolly unveiled at his grandfather’s store in Cromwell. One of the greatest surgeons in New Zealand medical history is not listed in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. In Douglas Starr’s seemingly comprehensive history, Blood: An epic history of medicine and commerce, Norman Bethune, a Canadian celebrity-surgeon, is given four pages, while Douglas Jolly, who was at least as innovative a wartime surgeon as Bethune, is referred to once and listed in the index as merely ‘Dr. Jolly’. Though Jolly’s contributions to surgery and wartime medical strategy are invaluable and evident in accident and emergency departments today, his reputation has remained obscure.
Until now, that is. Wellington author Mark Derby has resuscitated Douglas Jolly in his superlatively readable and scrupulously researched book, Frontline Surgeon. His purpose in writing the book was simple: ‘Jolly’s wartime reputation deserves to be restored, albeit posthumously, to the historical record’. But in telling Jolly’s compelling story, Derby also unspools narratives of military medicine and history.
Jolly was born in Cromwell in 1904 and graduated from the University of Otago Medical School in 1929. He left for London in 1932 to obtain specialist qualifications in surgery. However, once he learned physicians were needed in the Spanish Republican Army Medical Service, he broke off his studies. Jolly, a member of the Student Christian Movement, the oldest Christian organisation in Great Britain, believed Christianity could steer society toward socialism. In a letter published in News Sheet, the bulletin of the Christian Left, Jolly predicted, ‘the conflict between Fascism and Democracy in Spain may decide the fate of Europe and the world for many years to come’. He explained that as a Christian he needed to be on ‘the side of those who extend the brotherhood of man’. And so, he set off for Spain, beginning what would become seven years of combined service as a military surgeon.
The Spanish Civil War is often viewed as a rehearsal for, or arguably the first act of, World War II, in that it was, broadly speaking, a war of fascists against anti-fascists. On one side were Republicans, loyal to the Popular Front, a coalition of leftist parties democratically elected in 1936, whose incessant infighting became almost a civil war within the Civil War. On the other side were the rebel Nationalists, or fascists, who ultimately prevailed under the career soldier Francisco Franco. Franco ruled as Spain’s caudillo, or dictator, for 36 years, once the war ended in April 1939. In September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland, deploying the same techniques he’d tested in Spain on Franco’s behalf.
General Franco received support from Hitler and Mussolini through-out the conflict. Notably, the Condor Legion, a special unit of the German air force, blitzed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937. Pablo Picasso’s famous painting ‘Guernica’ attempts to portray a sense of this: families buried beneath ruins created by 500-kilogram bombs and crazed cattle ablaze with white phosphorous. Because of the Non-Intervention Agreement, which was signed by all major European powers (including Germany and Italy), the anti-fascist Republicans received little outside official support, apart from insufficient aid supplied by the Soviet Union. George Orwell summarises the situation well in his personal essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’: ‘Nazis and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished.’
But the dearth of support from countries such as Britain and France impelled international volunteers, about 60,000 of them, to travel to Spain and fight on the Republican side. Most volunteer soldiers were working class, though intellectuals, artists and idealists also joined up. Celebrated writers produced literary works affirming solidarity with the Republican cause; they included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Pablo Neruda and Arthur Koestler. Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls emerged out of war-time circumstances. George Orwell crossed the Pyrenees as a journalist and departed Barcelona as a wounded soldier, ready to tell his story in Homage to Catalonia.
Among those drawn of their own volition to the arena of war was Douglas Jolly. Derby deftly creates a portrait of Spain, narrating the war’s causes and progress without getting stuck on every date and acronym. The conflict, he writes, was ‘modern history’s earliest instance of a “total war”, one in which the entire population was engaged and that incurred many more civilian than combatant casualties’. When setting the scene for the war’s longest battle at the Ebro River, Derby’s prose brings Hemingway to mind, as the land ranges from ‘almond and cherry trees in the valleys to steeply terraced vineyards backed by sheer outcrops topped with pine and wild rosemary’.
Jolly was at every major battle of the Spanish Civil War and established five hospitals, saving the lives of Republicans and fascists alike. His first posting was in Madrid, where he led a mobile surgical unit. Derby writes that few volunteers had experience in military medicine, so doctors read books and lectured to one another. The babel of languages made this difficult. Derby tells us that Jolly’s ‘first field hospital had a staff of twelve, representing seven nationalities and almost as many languages’. He was known for his ‘easygoing Antipodean manner’. A nurse, Aurora Fernández, recalled Jolly as indefatigable, once performing a haka to boost morale when a group of medics nervously waited to break for the front. On another occasion, he managed to transport 25,000 oranges from Valencia to Madrid.
Most importantly in terms of medical strategy, Jolly developed his ‘three-point forward’ triage system to serve casualties better. In this model of wound care, as Derby nicely puts it, ‘the most important factor … is the system, not the surgeon’. A frontline clearing post separated those with critical injuries from those not as badly wounded. This system reduced the time between wounding and receiving treatment by having a dressing station near the front and then farther back a mobile hospital, after which casualties were evacuated to a base hospital. The American MASH units (mobile army surgical hospitals) in Korea and Vietnam were based on Jolly’s innovation.
Foreign volunteers in Spain were demobilised in 1938. The Republicans commended Jolly as an ‘excellent antifascist’ who operated as close as possible to the firing line. However, while the International Brigades are celebrated today for the fight they brought to Spain, not all were grateful for the foreign intervention. Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela dedicates his novel San Camilo to fallen Spaniards, not the ‘adventurers from abroad, Fascists and Marxists, who had their fill of killing Spaniards like rabbits and whom no one had invited to participate in our funeral’.
After a brief lecture tour in New Zealand to raise awareness about Republican refugees, Jolly returned to England and wrote his pioneering surgical manual, Field Surgery in Total War, published in 1940 and, as Derby writes, unsurpassed as ‘a standard work of military medicine for decades’. This book outlines three-point forward triage but also details how to treat the different wounds made by modern weapons, from broken bones to abdominal injuries. The Lancet declared that ‘every young surgeon who may be called upon to treat war casualties’ should read Jolly’s book. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed during World War II that Jolly’s book ‘contributed more to the saving of lives of patients with abdominal wounds’ than any other factor.
In World War II, Jolly again sought to aid anti-fascists, joining Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps in Tobruk, Libya. Later, he served in Italy as a senior medical officer of the New Zealand Hospital in Naples. Derby does excellent work in narrating the complicated mess of battle in the North African and Italian theatres—the heat and sand of the Sahara, the rain and mud of Italy, the movements of thousands of men and the transportation of litres of blood and tablets of penicillin. Jolly was an inspiring figure in what historian Mark Harrison calls these ‘crucibles of military medicine’.
In 1944, Jolly returned to the United Kingdom, ending his military service. When he received a military OBE for his ‘untiring zeal and quiet but thorough methods’ in battle, he reflected simply, ‘mother will be happy’.
The final pages of Derby’s book are poignant and beautifully told, as Jolly struggles to adjust to civilian life. Though he had two wars’ worth of experience in suturing bodies back together, he never gained the surgical qualification he had abandoned to take part in the Spanish struggle, and consequently he never practiced surgery again. He did join the staff of Queen Mary’s Hospital, a renowned orthopaedic centre, and did eventually become its chief medical officer. He married, settled in a village in Surrey, and enjoyed sailing his yacht, the Grey Heron. Though war is terrible, perhaps it suited Dr Jolly. As Derby writes, without the high spirits of battle—the ceaseless action and sense of purpose—this ‘physically robust, politically committed, and compassionate figure’, who had performed fearless and exacting work among the ‘blood and bombs’ of Spain, North Africa, and Italy, appeared ‘withdrawn, hesitant, and often unwell’.
Derby’s book has that fine amalgamation of ‘granite and rainbow’—of fact and art—that Virginia Woolf calls for in biography. Frontline Surgeon stands easily alongside other biographies told through the prism of war, such Peter Stansky’s and William Abraham’s exquisite Journey to the Frontier, the story of poets Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died young at the Spanish front. In his autobiographical essay, Orwell advises ‘good prose is like a windowpane’: transparent and clean, free of purple passages, meaningless sentences, and ‘humbug generally’. Mark Derby’s book is all windowpane.
ERIC TRUMP lives in Dunedin, where he writes and teaches medical humanities at the University of Otago. He spent a few years in Madrid, where he lived near the ruins of a church that was burned down the day after the Spanish Civil War began.
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