Bloody Reality - what is the politics of medicine when it is involved in keeping a war effort going?
'Bloody Reality' was the title of a photo feature in the Guardian's G2 on November 25th 2008, by artist David Cotterell. David went to Afghanistan to observe the work of military medical staff at the main field hospital at Camp Bastion. His diary and photographs were on show at the Wellcome Collection's War and Medicine exhibition in February 2009. They are a harrowing reminder of the cost of war.
The Guardian feature had this postcript from David. It is a challenge to our media regarding truth and priorities...
"During my month-long stay in Helmand, two British soldiers died, 29 were wounded in action and there were 74 admissions to the field hospital. Seventy-one Aeromed evacuations were recorded and an undisclosed number of civilian, insurgent and Afghan National Army soldiers were treated.
I arrived back in Britain feeling a great sense of anger. I was frustrated by my previous ignorance of the frequency of injury. Soldiers are surviving wounds that would often have been fatal in previous conflicts. Body armour, medical training and the proximity of advanced surgery to the front line have led to a 'disproportionate' number of casualties surviving.
In the media, we hear only about the deaths, with occasional reference to the wounded. I came home assuming the violence I had witnessed in Afghanistan would be the focus of the news. But reality television, local politics and other less dramatic events occupied the headlines. For me, the incongruity between what I had seen and what was presented as the public face of conflict was, and continues to be, profound and irreconcilable."
War and Medicine Exhibition
Destroying lives, repairing lives...uncomfortable bedfellows?
A big problem of warfare is that it keeps away from what it is to be humanising - how can medicine be reconciled with that? We must continue to ponder the uneasy relationship that was explored with bravura in this show. Put together with the Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden, it dared to tackle big ideas and to answer troubling, topical questions - through the analysis of medical interventions including the wartime drams of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole, the birth of psychiatry as a response to shellshock in WW1 and trhough David Cotterell's installation - referred to above.
Especially striking about the relationship between war and medicine is that, as armies have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of harming their enemies, medicine has had to respond virtuosically to the changes in types of wounded casualties and increases in their number.
In his review of the War and Medicine exhibition, Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian asked -
'What kind of sick society would organise itself that way?'