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In Book Takes, authors share three things readers will gain from their books as well as giving an insight into what they learnt during the researching and writing. This weekend, Mark Derby talks about writing a biography of one of New Zealand’s unsung heroes in Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly.
Writer and historian Mark Derby came across Douglas Jolly nearly two decades ago while writing Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. While Derby continued writing about a range of other subjects – Rua Kēnana, John Cullen, white-collar unions and an award-winning history of Mt Eden Prison – he couldn’t help thinking about Jolly.
He found it staggering that Jolly, who pioneered mobile emergency surgery during the Spanish Civil War and has been described as “one of the most notable war surgeons of the 20th century”, was all but forgotten at home in NZ.
The more Derby learned about Jolly, the more he came to like him.
“He was a great singer at parties, and would perform his school haka in the middle of an operating theatre to inspire his exhausted colleagues... He insisted on operating first on his most critically injured patients, even when they were troops from the opposing side. He carried out more complex abdominal operations in Spain than most surgeons see in their entire career yet was not permitted to practise surgery in peace time.”
Here’s what Derby believes readers will find most interesting about Frontline Surgeon.
Doug Jolly’s international reputation as surgical pioneer:
Jolly came from the small town of Cromwell in Central Otago, and in the Spanish Civil War and World War II he proved to be a brilliant, courageous and greatly dedicated surgeon. In 1940, he wrote a manual to pass on the lessons from his recent experience in Spain. Emeritus professor Sir Paul Preston, perhaps the most distinguished historian of the Spanish Civil War, says that this book “provided crucial instruction for British and American surgeons during the Second World War”.
Yet today, Jolly is barely remembered in his country of birth and isn’t mentioned in our official war histories. Redressing that surprising gap in our national memory, and understanding the reasons for it, were my main motivations for writing this book.
Jolly’s association with renowned figures of the 20th century:
While studying for specialist qualifications in surgery in London in the early 1930s, Jolly met the Hungarian-born émigré economist Karl Polanyi, who remained his lifelong friend and confidant. Polanyi was recently described as “the greatest thinker you’ve never heard of”, and his posthumous admirers include economists Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty. I’ve quoted from the strikingly frank letters between Polanyi and Jolly in my book, and I was thrilled to receive emails from his daughter Kari, now aged 100 but still intellectually vigorous.
In Spain, Jolly operated on the great photographer Gerda Taro, lover and colleague of the better-known Robert Capa, who received credit for photographs later found to have been taken by her. In the last days of the Spanish Civil War, Jolly shared cramped quarters with the US novelist and war correspondent Ernest Hemingway, whose novels he had read and admired but whose out-sized personality did not impress him.
His innovations continue to influence trauma and emergency medicine today:
In the desperate conditions of war-torn Spain, Jolly developed systems for treating people, both soldiers and civilians, as soon as possible after they were injured, and those innovations saved thousands of lives.
The same principles, in evolved form, were then used during WWII and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Decades after Jolly’s death in 1983, his emphasis on the need to treat critically injured people within the shortest possible time still influences trauma and emergency surgery worldwide.
The surgical adviser to Doctors Without Borders France says, “Doug Jolly was obviously a precursor, laying the foundations for the damage-control emergency surgery now currently practised by military surgeons and organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. Much that he developed is still in use.”
One insight I gained while writing the book:
During a relentless conflict like the Spanish Civil War, when married couples might be separated by military order or sudden death at any time, passionate extramarital affairs were common.
Anna-Mária Basch, a Hungarian-born nurse and anti-fascist activist, arrived in Spain with her husband and their 16-year-old son. Soon, both males were fighting on the front lines while Anna-Mária worked as theatre nurse for Doug Jolly. Although their only common language was halting French, they soon became lovers.
I’m very grateful to the Hungarian professional translator Éva Cserháti, who provided most of my information on Anna-Mária and located a wealth of photos of this handsome pair, including one showing them at work over a Madrid operating table with the renowned Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune.
Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly by Mark Derby (Massey University Press, $45.00) is out on Thursday.
