Hospital Care and the British Standing Army, 1660-1714

Abstract

A sequel to Gruber von Arni's published doctoral thesis, Justice to the Maimed (2001), which examined Army medical care from 1642 to 1660 during the Civil War and under Cromwell's New Model Army, this new volume is a narrative history that extends that study across the subsequent half-century of English military history under the Later Stuarts. The central purpose of this new work has been to investigate a wide selection of previously unused archival material in order to trace the ways in which the army reconstituted and developed institutions at home and in the field to provide medical care for soldiers and wounded veterans. In undertaking these historical studies, Gruber von Arni has brought to bear thirty years of his own professional experience that had culminated in his service as director of studies for Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps. This exceptional background has allowed him to discern his subject carefully and with unusual insight. Gruber von Arni very appropriately commences his narrative with an investigation of the medical experience at the Garrison Hospital at Tangier in 1661–83, which, as in several other themes in naval and military history, provided a formative experience for a number of key individuals that was carried forward to influence British practice in the wars of William III and Anne. The author proceeds by examining military hospitals and welfare for soldiers in Britain between 1660 and 1688 as well as the disastrous medical situation in Ireland during William III's campaigns in 1689–92 that led to improved medical support during William III's campaigns during the Nine Years’ War in Flanders. He then turns to soldier-patients in London hospitals between 1689 and 1702, hospitals in Flanders during Marlborough's campaigns 1702–12 with particular emphasis on the use of mobile field hospitals in connection with the main field hospital at Bijloke, Gent. Gruber van Arni ends his work by examining the very different situation which prevailed in the British Army's hospitals during the campaigns in Spain and Portugal between 1702 and 1711, where relatively little care was provided. He concludes his study by arguing that Marlborough—with Cadogan, his quartermaster-general, Dr Thomas Lawrence, the Army's physician-general, and John Hudson, his hospital contractor—created a military medical system that was far more effective than that used by other British commanders in this period and one that became a model for use later in the eighteenth century. Gruber von Arni has produced an excellent and much-needed series of contributions to the professional literature for those serving within the field of military medicine. At the same time, this historical work provides a reading of English documents that will stimulate specialists in this period to go further in examining the subject, particularly the interrelationships between military and naval medical practice, and, even more importantly, to examine the subject in the light of foreign archival materials.