Wounded
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  • Published: 12 September 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448186969
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 22 min
  • Narrator: Nigel Anthony
  • RRP: $19.99

Wounded

From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Mar 2014
EBook
12 Sep 2013
Audiobook
12 Sep 2013
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A homage to the courage and determination of the men and women who cared for – and saved the lives of – the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who were wounded at the Western Front.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him – stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses – from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty.

We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home. There are the unspeakable injuries: the officer with a hole in his torso so big the doctor can see the sky beyond him; a man with no legs holding a hymnbook for a man with no arms. Together, the experiences in Wounded encapsulate what it was to fight, live and die for four long years at the Western Front.

The first comprehensive account of medical care at the Western Front, Wounded is a homage to the courageous and determined men and women who saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
  • Published: 12 September 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448186969
  • Imprint: RH AudioGo
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 22 min
  • Narrator: Nigel Anthony
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

About the author

Emily Mayhew

Emily Mayhew is the author of Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918. She is Research Associate at Imperial College and consultant and lecturer to various museums including the Wellcome Collection, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons. Her first book, The Reconstruction of Warriors, was published in 2004.

Emily’s primary research interest is the history of the medical treatment of severe casualty in 20th and 21st century warfare. She is determined to ensure that, in particular, the work and courage of the stretcher bearers of the Great War is properly represented during the centenary commemorations.

During Autumn of 2014 she will be speaking at the Royal Institution, the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, the Liverpool History Society, the Florence Nightingale Museum, and the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Great War Centenary Commemoration.

portrait photo of Emily Mayhew

Praise for Wounded

Powerful… Does justice to the experience of the wounded and the dedication of the doctors, nurses, orderlies, stretcher bearers and volunteers who cared for them, by weaving together the testimonies of individuals into a moving history

A W Purdue, Times Higher Education

Moving

Tony Rennell, Daily Mail

Wounded is a powerful and descriptive read, and through it I found a greater understanding of what it was to be part of that war

Sarah Mullally, Church Times

Among the many books commemorating the conflict, one stands out for its specialisation. This is Wounded... Mayhew is to be commended for giving us these testimonies

Colin Gardiner, Oxford Times

A fascinating read

Stephen Coulson, Lady

Both tragic and uplifting, for me it brought home the full horrors of the war

Cultural Voyager

Fascinating

Gun Mart

Mayhew deftly describes such daily horrors as shattered jaws and severed arteries, filthy uniforms and decay. What takes the book beyond the standard accounts of the trenches, however, is its depiction of how such terrible circumstances forced people to respond in remarkable ways

Victoria Segal, Guardian

An original and absorbing account... [Mayhew] has a marvellous eye for quirky and horrifying detail... Absolutely compelling

Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement

Requires total immersion followed by quiet contemplation… Not only a history of medicine. It is a history dedicated to men […] for whom the war-afflicted body was a life sentence

Joanna Bourke, Lancet
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