FEATURE: BOOKS

Theatres of War

Doug Jolly’s ideas largely transformed frontline medicine after the Spanish Civil War, yet the New Zealander never got his dues.  

But a new book by Wellington historian Mark Derby helps fill the gap, documenting the impact the doctor made after codifying the techniques he’d developed.  

Frontline Surgeon covers Jolly’s journey from Central Otago, his education in Dunedin and subsequently Britain, and his exploits in saving lives on the Spanish frontlines. It also documents his troubled post-war years, until his death in 1983. 

Derby first became aware of Jolly almost two decades ago, when he met postgrad student Michael O’Shaughnessy in Wellington. 

The student’s thesis was on New Zealand involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He’d been researching the records of the International Brigade in Moscow, which had been inaccessible during the Cold War. 

“Michael introduced me to the subject, and Doug Jolly’s papers,” Derby relates. “Of all the combatants and non-combatants from this country who were in Spain, he was the one who stood out to me as the guy who’d made the most outstanding contribution.” 

The fact that Jolly’s contribution had been largely overlooked seemed inexplicable, considering his ideas had been widely adopted in battlefield medicine. 

Derby tracked down some of the surgeon’s relatives in Central Otago, and while they knew he’d gone overseas, even they weren’t aware of his work and influence. 

“He was this guy who had a really significant international impact,” the author says. “There were senior military surgeons in the United States saying ‘this guy’s really transformed our whole notion of wartime medical services’.” 

Official war histories in Britain and New Zealand had no mention of Doug Jolly’s name, while his contemporaries from Spain were highly celebrated. 

An anti-fascist, Jolly had joined the Republican fight like thousands of others during the Spanish Civil War. 

He had been working as a doctor in London, and was about to graduate as a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Purely out of necessity, he brought new ideas to treating the carnage of the battlefront. 

“His innovations were of a different nature,” Derby observes. “They were more long-lasting. He developed an entire approach to treating battlefield injuries that overturned what had been developed during World War One.” 

That revolved around treating patients in the shortest time possible, an approach that has informed trauma medicine since, both in combat zones and emergency departments. 

The idea of a ‘golden hour’ for treating the injured could be traced back to Jolly’s work, Derby has been told. Where soldiers with abdominal injuries had often been left to die previously, the surgeon believed it was his job to save anyone who had a chance of survival. 

“He came from a Christian socialist tradition where everyone is of intrinsic value,” Derby says. “He lived by that, even to the extent that if wounded enemy troops were brought in, he treated them too - strictly in order of urgency.” 

Jolly also pioneered the idea of mobile operating theatres that could be as close as possible to where the fighting was most fierce, rather than being miles from the frontline. That approach was widely adopted across battlefields since, and was the inspiration for the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals depicted in television series M*A*S*H. 

After the Spanish Civil War, Jolly laid down his techniques in the book Field Surgery in Total War, published in the early years of World War Two. His systems were in use during that campaign, then through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and beyond. 

However, during his research for Frontline Surgeon, Derby discovered some of the reasons that may have led to Jolly being sidelined. 

As well as possibly being the victim of British snobbery towards Antipodeans, he found that Jolly clearly had a mental health condition, possibly bipolar disorder.  

“In wartime it perhaps worked in his favour,” Derby notes. “He was known for being able to perform complex, demanding abdominal operations all day, all night, all the next day. He would just keep going - a normal person can’t do that.” 

Jolly was also known for performing passionate hakas in his Spanish operating theatre - a practice perhaps not so acceptable in conservative Britain.  

As a consequence, although he was an experienced and highly regarded surgeon, Jolly was no longer permitted to practice surgery during peacetime. 

Instead, in the 1950s he took up a non-clinical post at Queen Mary’s Hospital near London, later becoming its chief medical officer.   

“It was largely an administrative role, and he was quite non-innovative at it,” Derby says. “He kept the hospital going, and that was it basically. But I greatly admire him, because he was courageous in wartime, and in peacetime. He held it together against great odds.” 

• Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand Medical Pioneer Doug Jolly by Mark Derby is published by Massey University Press.