Jessica Meyer

University of Leeds · School of History

This article considers the ways in which the male life course in twentieth-century Britain can be reconstructed through individual personal pension files of British disabled ex-servicemen from the First World War. The files contain a range of documentation, including military enlistment and discharge forms, medical records, and correspondence from...

This edited collection repositions the patient experience at the centre of healthcare histories and considers the contributions that such histories can make to debates over health policy and service delivery.

This chapter explores how the military priority of manpower conservation affected the nature and wartime work of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in three areas: recruitment, treatment, and rehabilitation. It considers how matters of manpower conservation shaped RAMC work in terms of general military recruitment and how the policies of recruitme...

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, this book explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them...

This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical vi...

The subject of British military medicine during the First World War has long been a fruitful one for historians of gender. From the bodily inspection of recruits and conscripts through the expanding roles of women as medical care providers to the physical and emotional aftermath of conflict experienced by men suffering from war-related wounds and i...

This chapter summarizes the arguments made in the previous chapters, relating the points that they make to the representation of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the aftermath of the war. It further considers what information is known about the post-war activities of some of the men whose personal narratives have been discussed in the text, to refle...

This chapter uses a range of cultural representations of the men of the RAMC produced during the war to explore how these men perceived their own work and status, and how these were perceived by those they encountered in their caring roles. Drawing on theories of cultural representation, it uses close readings of cartoons, poetry, hospital magazine...

This chapter examines the ways in which men were recruited to the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout the period 1914 to 1918 using both official documentation relating to recruitment policy and personal recollections of the recruitment process. It then examines training manuals, both official and unofficial, to explore how civilian recruits were t...

This chapter outlines the chain of evacuation along the line of communication which formed the remit of the work of the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout the war. Using official publications and personal narratives, both contemporaneous and retrospective, it explores the diverse spaces in which men from the ranks of the Corps undertook their cari...

This chapter surveys the formation and reformation of the British Army Medical Services in the period from the Crimean War to the outbreak of the First World War. It locates the social and political debates around the nature and make-up of the unit in the context of wider reforms to the military and the medical profession. It further identifies the...

An Equal Burden forms the first scholarly study of the Army Medical Services in the First World War to focus on the roles and experiences of the men of the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). These men, through their work as stretcher-bearers and orderlies, provided a range of labour, both physical and emotional, in aid of the sick and wo...

This chapter revisits the chain of evacuation from the perspective of how RAMC Other Ranks’ work was influenced by strategic and technological changes in practice, both military and medical, as they developed over the course of the war. By exploring how such change over time affected the working practices of the men of the RAMC, it interrogates the...

From its first series in 2010, the ITV television drama Downton Abbey laid claim to representing early twentieth-century British society with great historical accuracy while being lambasted by critics for presenting a sanitized version of modern British social history. This article looks at how the programme was drawn, over the course of its broadc...

For First World War stretcher bearers, wartime landscapes had a direct impact on the work they undertook. Trenches, shell holes, mud and sand all presented challenges to their ability to carry wounded men swiftly and safely from where they were injured to aid posts and beyond. At the same time, landmarks could assist bearers in navigating the lands...

Book review: Nine Centuries of Man: manhood and masculinities in Scottish history, edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, xii + 284 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-47440-389-4

This chapter draws upon the personal narratives of noncommissioned rankers serving with the British Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I to explore how these men responded to encounters with bodily strength and weakness in their roles as male caregivers. In particular, it examines how they constructed the disablement of combatant troops by w...

During the First World War the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) served as the coordinating body for voluntary medical aid giving in Britain. Among the many units which came within its purview was the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU), formed by a group of young men whose desire to serve their nation in wartime conflicted with their pacifist principles....

The current centenary of the First World War provides an unrivalled opportunity to uncover some of the social legacies of the war. The four articles which make up this special issue each examine a different facet of the war's impact on British society to explore an as yet untold story. The subjects investigated include logistics, the history of sci...

This book is visually beautiful. From the full-colour reproduction of a recruiting poster that forms the cover image to the numerous black-and-white photographs of men engaged in sporting activity that liberally illustrate it, the book is lovely to look at. And these images form only a small part of the rich seam of primary source material that Jam...

On 7 November, 2006, the British government announced that it would issue pardons to the 306 British soldiers executed for military offences during the First World War. This marked the culmination of a long-running campaign for pardons led by the Shot at Dawn organization. According to this association, most of those “brutally gunned down by the au...

This article examines gendered discourses of shell shock in Britain during the First World War. Located within the context of the ideas about shell shock as a form of male hysteria put forward by Elaine Showalter, it examines the ways in which the contemporary discourses of soldiers, medical professionals and popular novelists used ideas of maturit...

Despite the immense loss of life suffered by the British armed forces during four years of total war, the majority of servicemen survived the war, although many bore its scars upon their bodies and minds in the form of wounds, amputations and psychological disorders.1 By 1929, 1,600,000 men had been awarded a pension or gratuity by the British gove...

On 8 September 1917, Cyril Newman, a lance corporal with the 9th Battalion The London Regiment wrote to his fiancée, Winnie, of his emotions on receiving two letters from her. ‘I feel a different person,’ he wrote, ‘ten years younger — a hundred times lighter at heart. We all feel like this. The arrival of mail is vital to our happiness ….“No post”...

Letters and diaries were narrative spaces in which men could construct their own identities as soldiers at war. They were also, however, particularly diaries, spaces in which others could be observed and, in the case of the dead, commemorated. In diaries, such commemorations constructed the remembered dead in heroic terms, as good comrades, brave l...

Men’s identities are never set in stone and nowhere is this more evident than in the microcosm of war with its power to disrupt the gender order. Viewed over the course of the First World War, British servicemen’s perceptions of their own identity as soldiers can be seen to have been contingent upon a number of factors, including the imminence of d...

While letters home were some of the most common written narratives produced by British soldiers, they were by no means the only form. Men also found expression for their experiences through poems, short stories, cartoons and articles some of which were published in the press, other of which found their way into the numerous trench journals that cir...

Despite Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s assertion that ‘everyone who had served in the trenches for as much as five months, or who had been under two or three rolling barrages, was an invalid,’1 not all those who served in the war were disabled by it. Nor were correspondences with government ministries the only form of written narrative produced by...

British combatant authors of the First World War have long laid claim to being the truth-tellers of the war and many historians have used the literary legacy of the war as a source of evidence. Much of this analysis has concentrated on a number of well-known sources, including the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and bio...

Much of the writing on gender and the First World War has looked at the ways in which pre-war gender norms were reasserted in British society after the War. The article looks at the experiences of one group of women, the wives of men psychologically disabled by the experience of war, to show how disability could prevent the reassertion of pre-war g...