Overview

James McGrigor championed the common soldier and transformed medical care in the British Army through personal commitment and by revolutionising the training of medical officers. This biography celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir James McGrigor, widely regarded as the father of British Army Medical Services, and explains why he rose to great prominece during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. McGrigor had a great interest in the medical profession and was a man of integrity, courage, and initiative who loved the Army. He devoted his life to improving medical care of individual soldiers, whether privates or junior officers, and achieved this by personal example and firm leadership. He had the support, loyalty and affection of all his subordinates and the respect and cooperation of senior military commanders. The Duke of Wellington had complete confidence in McGrigor's ability, and regarded him as the most loyal of public servants. McGrigor had great powers of observation and throughout his long career kept accurate records, partly to advance his own professional knowledge and skill and partly to gain a better understanding of the many diseases which were responsible for nearly four times as many soldiers' deaths than wounds. Throughout his career, and especially when he became Director General of Army Medical Services in 1815, McGrigor ensured that every medical officer received an education and training second to none, enabling him to deliver the best possible medical care to his charges. Measures introduced and employed by McGrigor are as applicable today as they were more than two hundred years ago. This is the story of his remarkable life, which was truly a great adventure.

Full Product Details

9781914059216

Table of Contents

Reviews

This excellent book may encourage them [modellers] to devise campaign systems that better reflect the importance of providing good medical care. * Miniature Wargames - Arthur Harman *

Author Information

Tom Scotland was educated at Waid Academy, Anstruther and at the University of Edinburgh. He studied Medicine, graduating in 1971, and pursued a career in surgery. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1975 and was appointed Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, NHS Grampian and Honorary Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen in 1983, at which time he became a member of the Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society, co-founded in 1789 by James McGrigor. Since retiring from the NHS in 2007, he has pursued his interest in military surgical history and has delivered lectures at national and international meetings. He has co-edited a book War Surgery 1914-18, and has co-authored four further works, Wars, Pestilence and the Surgeon`s Blade, Understanding the Somme 1916: An Illuminating Battlefield Guide, Understanding the Ypres Salient: An Illuminating Battlefield Guide and Henry Gray, Surgeon of the Great War, Saving Lives in a Theatre of Destruction. His most recent work A Time to Die and a Time to Live: Disaster to Triumph, deals with ground-breaking developments which impacted on war surgery and greatly improved the outcome for wounded soldiers in the First World War.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available