‘Would it not be better to just stop?’ Dutch medical aid in World War I and the medical anti-war movement in the interwar years

Abstract

During World War I, the Netherlands sent several ambulances to assist the medical services of the warring nations. Although acting mostly far away from the battlefields, they encountered gruesome scenes, which they described in Dutch magazines. They themselves hardly ever concluded that therefore war must be stopped, let alone stop medical aid during wartime. But some of their colleagues, first some nurses and later also some physicians, did. They were already mostly politically left-wing oriented and, certainly in the case of the nurses, pleading for suffrage. Already in 1918 this resulted in an appeal to stop medical assistance – 20 years before Cambridge professor John Ryle made a similar plea. Stopping medical aid in wartime would prevent more people from getting wounded and dying than anything that medicine could cure. The medical experiences during the war further resulted in the interwar years in the formation of some medical peace movements, initially by nurses – generally embedded in the larger, common peace movement – and later by doctors, who distanced themselves from the common peace movement because this would endanger medical neutrality. This had, however, already weakened the medical peace movement. The threat of a new war put an end to medical peace action.