Barris - Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire

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M ILITARY H ISTORY

Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany

The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

Breaking the Silence: Veterans Untold Stories

from the Great War to Afghanistan

Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 912, 1917

Days of Victory: Canadians Remember, 19391945

(sixtieth anniversary edition, 2005)

Juno: Canadians at D-Day, June 6, 1944

Canada and Korea: Perspectives 2000 (contributor)

Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 19501953

Days of Victory: Canadians Remember, 19391945

(with Alex Barris, first edition, 1995)

Behind the Glory: Canadas Role in the Allied Air War

O THER N ON -F ICTION

101 Things Canadians Should Know about Canada (contributor)

Making Music: Profiles from a Century of Canadian Music

(with Alex Barris)

Carved in Granite: 125 Years of Granite Club History

Playing Overtime: A Celebration of Oldtimers Hockey

Spirit of the West: The Beginnings, the Land, the Life

Positive Power: The Story of the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club

Rodeo Cowboys: The Last Heroes

Fire Canoe: Prairie Steamboat Days Revisited

Rush to Danger

Copyright 2019 by Ted Barris.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Published by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Maps and diagrams created by Lightfoot Art & Design Inc.

Photo inserts by Gordon Robertson.

Cover image: British Army medics carrying a wounded soldier to safety, Norway, 1940. Imgur.com. Public domain.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition: AUGUST 2019 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-4794-2

Version 07242019

Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-4792-8

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request.

LSC / H 9 87654321

For my sister Kate Barris, who treasures the written word

as much as Dad and I, and who helped me reveal

our fathers war.

I VE OFTEN SAID I became an emergency physician because the shift work gave me lots of time to develop my writing and broadcasting careers. In fact, I wanted to overcome my fear that I might rush into danger and not know what to do.

Experience and courses such as Advanced Cardiac Life Support and Advanced Trauma Life Support have made it possible for me to run toward the resuscitation room instead of away from it. Beyond the emergency room, I used that capacity to put aside doubts about my own abilities in shopping malls and at cruising altitude aboard passenger jets.

A few months back, I was returning home with my family from a vacation in Costa Rica. A Westjet flight attendant came on the intercom and asked if there was a physician on board. I raised my hand immediately and was escorted to the forward cabin, where I found a woman who was conscious but somewhat disoriented. I introduced myself and took a brief history while obtaining a blood pressure and pulse.

To the pilots immense relief, I quickly ascertained that my patient did not require urgent medical attention. That meant he did not have to divert the aircraft to the nearest airport.

In the meantime, I put myself in the place of my patient and her startled husband.

I know youre frightened about this, I told them. But youre going to be okay.

I was exhibiting what psychologists call cognitive empathy, the capacity to imagine things from the perspective of someone else, and to have that insight inform ones actions. Its a primary aspect of empathy. Another is affective or emotional empathy, which is the capacity to feel what another person feels. And a third aspect is the get-up-and-go that makes first responders rush to the aid of others.

In his book Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire, Ted Barris tells the gripping stories of men and womenrecent and pastwho have risked their own lives to tend to the bodies and psyches of the war wounded.

The book reminds us again and again of the quiet heroism of military physicians, nurses, and medics who have provided medical care to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of wounded and ill soldiers under enemy fire. Some of them enlisted. Many were drafted into the wars of their times. Others just rose to meet the challenge of a lifetime that they encountered by happenstance.

Augusta Chiwy was a twenty-three-year-old registered nurse originally from the Belgian Congo who just happened to be heading home to visit her parents in Bastogne, Belgium, in the days leading up to Christmas 1944. She arrived just as Adolf Hitler had sent more than 400,000 German troops and 1,400 tanks into the Ardennes as part of Operation Watch on the Rhine, a desperate attempt to thwart the Allied advance toward Germany. Working beside US Army medic Jack Prior, Chiwy volunteered to lend her nursing skills to Allied troops. During a week-long siege of Bastogne, they treated hundreds of casualties while dodging enemy fire that destroyed the makeshift aid station where they worked.

Others performed medical miracles under conditions that can only be described as barbaric. Dr. Jacob Markowitz, a Canadian physician who enlisted in Britains Royal Army Medical Corps, served as surgical officer during the fall of Singapore. He was eventually captured by the Japanese. Despite being given no medical equipment or supplies, Markowitz used his medical and surgical know-how to tend to thousands of fellow prisoners of war, often working up to eighteen hours a day for many days at a time. He even risked his own life by hiding meticulous accounts of their working and living conditions in amongst the many bodies of prisoners who died in captivity.

The medicine I practise every day owes a debt of gratitude to the medicine learned, practised, and improvised on the battlefield. Barris shows us that the modern ambulance was invented during the American Civil War, and the first blood bank was used by the British during the Great War. Sadly, modern asymmetrical and urban warfare have only increased the need for medical ingenuity and empathic human beings to step up.