Dear Readers and Friends,
Yesterday, I posted about my physician protagonist. Today, I am featuring Dr. Likeman, who had lived and worked in Papua New Guinea for several years. I was thrilled to meet Dr. Likeman in Melbourne last year, at the unveiling of the statue commemorating fallen Australian doctors in World Wars I and II. Robert Likeman has published six meticulous volumes on Australian doctors in these wars and numerous articles. I am honored to stay in touch wit him.
“PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF[1]
In the aftermath of the horrific Kibeho massacre in Rwanda in 1995, one of my soldiers whispered to me, ‘I guess it’s all right for you doctors – you are familiar with death’.
Familiar ? Yes; we are certainly more familiar with death than the average person, but that does not mean we are not affected by it. Nobody could reflect on the senseless slaughter of 4000 men, women and children, and not be profoundly disturbed by it. But even in civilian practice there are few deaths which leave doctors completely unmoved. Trauma and violence and premature demise are not limited to acts of war. But as this soldier’s remark demonstrates, doctors are generally expected to carry on regardless.
Those outside the profession seldom have insight into the inner turmoil that military medical officers experience in a war zone. In 1897 when he was a subaltern in the Indian Army, Sir Winston Churchill wrote,
‘The spectacle of a doctor in action among soldiers, in equal danger and with equal courage, saving life where all others are taking it, allaying pain where all others are causing it, is one that must always seem glorious, whether to God or man’.[2]
I doubt that any doctor in Malakand or Kigali or Kandahar felt glorious in his work.
Having seen some of the horrors of war myself, it came as no surprise to me when I was researching the lives of the doctors who served in the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915, to discover that two of them shot themselves on their return to Egypt.[3] These deaths were hushed up by the authorities for shame, and in the case of one of them, his mother was informed that he had ‘Died of Wounds’. Later on, as my researches took me through the remaining years of WW1, I recorded up to fifteen Australian WW1 medical officers who definitely or probably committed suicide.[4] And there were others who spent months or years in psychiatric institutions on their return to Australia, and yet others who never practised medicine again.
On operational service the medical officer first and foremost shares with other soldiers the risk of being killed or wounded. The risk is certainly less than that of those in front-line combat; in WW1 34 doctors were killed in action, and another 21 died from disease or accidents. But every war that we have fought has claimed the lives of doctors. As recently as 1993 a medical officer from the Australian Army was killed in an air crash while serving with the United Nations in the Western Sahara.[5]
In addition to the physical danger, military medical officers face the emotional strain of treating desperately wounded soldiers day after day. In recent times casualty management has become very much more sophisticated than in either of the World Wars, but men still die – 41 Australians during our deployment to Afghanistan, out of 3500 from the NATO forces.
In WW1, when medical support was very basic, there were many wounded who might have been saved if they had received timely and skilled treatment. As one Regimental Medical Officer [6] wrote in a letter home in 1916,
‘An abundance of shell dressings, a bottle of morphia solution and a syringe, and a supply of water, are all that is absolutely essential’.
How much more could he have done if he had been adequately equipped? In 1917 he wrote again,
‘The ground around the Regimental Aid Post (RAP) was littered with wounded who had died, who had to be piled in heaps to clear the trenches; and along the track from the RAP to Zonnebeke, a distance of over a mile, the dead lay every few yards. From the medical point of view this operation was one of the most depressing that could be imagined’.
Such images are not easily forgotten, especially when linked to feelings of helplessness and guilt and professional failure, because every casualty could not be saved. We are familiar with death, yes; but not unaffected by it.”
Published in the Medical Journal of Australia, 202(7) 20 April 2015.
Here is the link to Colonel Likeman’s books:
https://a.co/d/ijXIjm7
Link to his website:
https://www.robertlikeman.com/about
“REFERENCES
[1] Luke iv,23
[2] Churchill, WS. The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Nelson and Sons, London 1916, pp 51-52.
[3] Likeman, RK. Gallipoli Doctors, Slouch Hat Publications, McCrae 2010, pp 137 and 184-185
[4] Likeman, RK. Suicide by WW1 Army Doctors: PTSD or Something Else ? Paper presented at the Australasian Military Medicine Association Conference, Sydney, November 2014.
[5] Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour. Major Susan Lee Felsche was killed at Awsard in June 1993, during MINURSO, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in the Western Sahara.
[6] Likeman, RK. Australian Doctors on the Western Front, Rosenberg Publishing, Sydney 2014, p 155.”
Statue honoring Australian doctors in World wars I and II where I met Dr. Likeman.
“Lest We Forget.”
Thank you all for reading.
Loretta Goldberg
