Tag Archives: Western Front

Lecture: ‘Part of the Family’ – the Medical Officer on the Western Front

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‘Part of the Family’— the Medical Officer on the Western Front
A lecture in memory of Noel Chavasse, VC and bar

Speaker: Professor Mark Harrison
Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine

Weston Library, Broad Street
5.30pm, Thursday, 2 February 2017

Advance booking essential

For more information and to book places:
alumni@trinity.ox.ac.uk
01865 (2)79887

Further information here. Download poster: poster lecture

This is the final lecture in the series Duty, Courage, Faith: The Chavasse Family in World War I, inaugurated by St Peter’s College.

Talk: Malaria and the War beyond the Western Front

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Public Lecture with Professor Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford
Glass Tank, Abercrombie, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane site
Tuesday, 29 November 2016, 16:00 to 17:30

This lecture will examine the British Army’s fight against one of its most implacable foes – the mosquito. In most theatres apart from the Western Front, malaria was an enormous drain on morale and military efficiency. It was by no means the only disease that led to heavy losses in theatres such as Salonika and the Middle East, but, along with venereal disease, it proved to be one of the most intractable. Wartime conditions worsened what was already, in many locations, an unfavourable situation as far as health was concerned. Preventive measures proved ill equipped to deal with these conditions, especially when troops were on the move. All armies suffered badly but ideas of racial immunity to malaria were used to justify the replacement of white troops in some theatres with ‘native’ troops from Britain’s imperial territories. This raised political tensions in territories such as India. The lecture will also consider the legacy of the war. The influx of many foreign troops, the destruction of infrastructure, and population displacement had a deep and enduring impact on the health of civilians.
About the speaker

Mark Harrison is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. He has written on many aspects of the history of disease and medicine in relation to war and imperialism. His books include The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (2010) and Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second World War (2005), both of which won the Templer Medal Book Prize awarded by the Society for Army Historical Research. He currently holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award entitled, ‘Invisible Crises, Forgotten Histories: Malaria in Asia, 1900-Present’.

For further information, please contact: Tudor Georgescu (tgeorgescu@brookes.ac.uk) and see here.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with The Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum and the Centre for Medical Humanities.

Exhibition: ‘Beyond the Western Front’, The Glass Tank, Oxford Brookes University

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Beyond the Western Front: Exploring Hidden Histories of the First World War
The Glass Tank, Abercrombie Atrium, Oxford Brookes University
Fri 18 Nov – Fri 16 Dec 2016

Please see here for information on the exhibition and to download the exhibition catalogue.

Tudor Georgescu (Oxford Brookes), in collaboration with Stephen Barker and the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum (Sofo), and the Centre for Hidden Histories at the University of Nottingham, present a special exhibition exploring the hidden histories of the First World War, as seen through the prism of the Ox and Bucks battalions’ experiences of the Italian, Balkan, Middle Eastern and Russian campaigns.

This exhibition goes beyond the well-trodden trenches of the Western Front, revealing a fascinating and intimate history of the First World War – one that also lucidly illustrates the global dimensions of WWI and our own role therein.

Three interconnecting sections investigate this rich legacy: The research projects conducted by the Sofo and Brookes volunteers that explore personal histories found in the museum archives; the artefacts on loan from the museum that are such impressive material legacies of the war; and the stereoscopic pictures converted to 3D anaglyphs that reinvent these remarkable images and make them accessible to a wider audience.

Ultimately, the exhibit aims to be an informal, engaging space in which to rediscover a remarkable perspective on the history of the First World War, and to encourage a conversation about what it means to us during the centenary commemorations and beyond.