Justice to the maimed soldier: nursing, medical care and welfare for sick and wounded soldiers and their families during the English civil wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660

Eric Gruber von Arni, a career army nursing officer and previous Director of Studies for Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, has deftly used his professional background to shape his historical pursuits in hitherto untapped areas of his profession's heritage. In particular, von Arni has succeeded in righting the incorrect stereotypic view that medical nursing did not exist before the contributions of Florence Nightingale. Indeed, we find that significant medical nursing efforts were used in caring for the numerous sick and wounded soldiers between the outbreak of England's civil war in 1642 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This war is of special medical significance for several reasons. It was the first period of fighting following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and their affiliated hospital-based health care. Thus, the care of the sick and wounded had been relegated to secularized sections of society. Additionally, the English civil wars ultimately created what the author claims to be a "more pronounced and significant" (p. 1) impact upon the nation than any other conflict in British history, either before or since. Regarding health care, people from all classes came to appreciate "the task of caring for the needy as a patriotic duty" (p. 197). In a work whose title, Justice to the maimed soldier, is taken from the inscription on the seal of the Parliament's Committee for Sick and Maimed Soldiers, von Arni divides his theme into chapters devoted to descriptions of both the King's and Parliament's armies, their respective administration of casualty care, comparisons between the care and treatments delivered at permanent military hospitals and the temporary establishments in civil war campaigns in the Celtic nations, the Caribbean and West Indies, and in Flanders. One chapter is also devoted to a comparative biographical sketch between three civil war nurses, the surgeon's widow, Margaret Blague, the Parliamentary informer, Elizabeth Alkin, and the Royalist noblewoman, Anne Murray. Von Ami's historical contribution is remarkable for several reasons. Above all, he provides convincing documentation that medical nursing efforts were firmly established centuries before the standard historical accounts. This task was particularly difficult as, unlike many medical history pursuits, the author had no ready repository from which he could shape his narrative. Nursing efforts, somewhat like those delivered at the hands of that other traditional female field of health care, midwifery, were hardly ever recorded in the ways that physicians and surgeons had long recorded their successes (or otherwise) in case histories. Thus, to secure documentation about this underresearched level of health care, the author has meticulously culled data from a number of scattered county, national, military, and medical sources. From these efforts, we have a much clearer view of the concerns that were foremost in the minds of the nursing staff. Among these concerns were the safe transportation of the wounded both to and within hospitals, the warehousing and re-supply of the most commonly used medical supplies, the control of air within the wards of permanent military hospitals, as well as the inability of port cities to accommodate, feed, and keep clean and warm the many incoming casualty patients who had been wounded in naval conflicts. Although slightly biased due to the relative greater abundance of records about Parliamentary forces, von Arni's research has aimed to build parallel views of each side. From this we leam that despite the Parliamentarians' initial advantage over the Royalists-due to