Soundararajan Jagdish (Independent Researcher)
The Military Welfare History Network (MWHN) held its first symposium at the University of Birmingham (10-11 April 2025). Supported with funding by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the symposium’s theme was ‘The Military Medicine and Welfare of the First World War: preparations, evolutions and legacies’.
It was gratifying to observe the increased discourse around the history of military medicine and, on a personal level, very pleasing to have my own paper accepted for presentation at the symposium. The event brought together, in the sylvan setting of the University campus, over a dozen scholars from six countries, across three continents. Dr Michael Robinson was the local organiser.
The MWHN, co-ordinated by the ever-enthusiastic Dr Paul Huddie, is a very active group of scholars and researchers. The sheer diversity of disciplines that feed into the novel construct that is military welfare history provides fresh and often, unexpected perspectives. This symposium was proof of that. Military welfare history may be considered to be a study of the impact of service in the military but viewed through multiple lenses, not least the experiences of different nationalities and cultures and those of families and dependants of military personnel.
The first keynote address, delivered on 10th April by Dr Brian Feltman of Georgia Southern University, was an absorbing exposition of the care and welfare of repatriated German prisoners of war following their incarceration in Britain during the Great War. It was superbly illustrated with examples of German posters of the time that sought to depict these prisoners as figures of tragedy. The talk also, importantly, described how the experience of incarceration was an important moment in the emerging recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder as a psychological entity, as evidenced by the description of ‘barbed-wire disease’ by the physician Adolf Vischer in 1918.
An informal dinner that evening enabled the speakers and attendees to get better acquainted and set the scene for the main symposium the following day. The following day began with the first panel devoted to the experience of war. Professor Alison Fell’s talk was an examination of the gendered narratives relating to the humanitarian work undertaken by volunteer nurses in the Great War. Not only did these women have immense self-confidence to be able to engage with multiple and often intransigent agencies, but they also had to straddle the unclear divide between the professional and the amateur, with the British volunteers more likely to be working closer to the frontline than their American counterparts. Continuing the theme of volunteer nursing, Professor Juliette Pattinson used the experiences of the iconic First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) to demonstrate the close links between modernity, feminism and the Great War. While the volunteer female nurse, considered the female equivalent of the volunteer soldier, did not pose a threat to masculinity, professional nurses, however, resented the FANYs being considered as nurses and as ‘mock heroines’. Both the talks showed how professional nursing boundaries were tested during this period. They were also revelatory in showing how social class largely determined the drive towards achieving equal treatment for women, notwithstanding the resistance from the male-dominated medical profession.
The next panel, which had as its theme, race and welfare, used three case studies to demonstrate disparities in imperial healthcare provision. The first, presented by Prof Dónal Hassett, described the so-called socially appropriate and segregated medical care for France’s West African soldiers and how this did not augur well for these veterans in their dotage. The persisting belief that excessive medical attention to these veterans especially from female nurses would likely upset the imperial social order together with official tendency to blame the indolence of the natives than its own inefficient setup meant that services such as prosthetics provision were poorly delivered if at all. Francis van Berkel’s talk, similarly demonstrated the gap between colonial rhetoric of sympathetic benevolence and the actual provision of medical and social care to veteran sepoys in the Indian Army. The infantilization of Indian veterans after the Great War may be ascribable to the widespread paternalistic impulses prevalent within the wider Indian military establishment. My talk followed, describing the medical debacle during the Mesopotamian Campaign of the Great War. Notwithstanding the Indian Government’s hubris that accounted for considerable ill-preparedness, my research, employing war diaries of senior medical officers, also showed how social, cultural and institutional tensions between the Indian Medical Service and the Royal Army Medical Corps jeopardised the timely provision of medical care and casualty evacuation.
The second keynote address, delivered by Professor Jessica Meyer, examined the experiences of disabled ex-servicemen after the Great War. Though such personnel sought to distance themselves from the military identities, financial realities such as pensions dictated that they had to comply with the dictates of a benefits system which, they believed, dehumanised them and denied them agency. While the officer veteran had more agency and more access to healthcare, the soldier veterans developed mistrust of institutionalized caregiving. This entanglement between welfare and warfare is quite possibly related to the emergence of the welfare state.
Anna Gehl, in the first talk of the final panel, described the neglect faced by injured medical and nursing volunteers in the Great War. Compensation, if any, was awarded through the Workman’s Compensation Act than through the War Injuries Act. Michael Robinson, the local organizer, described the policy inertia that afflicted veteran aftercare in the interwar years. The psycho-social determinants of health meant that any redemptive quality of war service was nullified, especially among working-class veterans. We were left with the sobering thought that, after the Great War, no nation sufficiently addressed the issue of the older veteran, especially in economically depressed areas.
In conclusion, this conference truly reflected the diversity of subjects that the study of military welfare history attracts. Many of the transnational narratives highlighted institutional neglect, hegemony, and discriminatory attitudes that silenced many voices.