Medicine in World War Two: Wounds, Shellshock and Penicillin

Interviews with Dr Ian Campbell, Dr Henry Adam and Dr Ronald Girdwood regarding the treatment of patients during the Second World War. This included patients wounded on the battlefield and men suffering from shellshock. Ronald Girdwood discusses the development of blood transfusion techniques, tropical diseases and penicillin.

Dr Ian Campbell was born in 1916 and attended Dingwall Academy and then the University of Edinburgh. He took part in the D-Day landing in June 1944, and treated casualties at various locations in France, Germany and Belgium. Campbell held a number of increasingly senior posts in the National Health Service, and also worked for the World Health Organisation on projects in Baroda, Gujarat State, Bangalore, Agra, New Dehli and Jakarta.

Dr Henry Adam was born in Wimbledon in 1911 to a Scottish father and Italian mother, speaking Italian as his first language and going to school in in Madrid and Rome as well as in Britain. Finishing up his schooling at George Watson’s College, Adam began his medical training at the University of Edinburgh in 1929. Throughout the late 1930s, he was involved in research and clinical medicine in the Western General Hospital and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, participating in the early days of blood transfusions with Sir Charles Illingworth. In 1945, Adam was posted at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where he gained intelligence about German research into biological warfare and typhus vaccines.

Dr Ronald Girdwood graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1939 and was Professor of Therapeutics at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh from 1962 to 1982, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 1975 to 1979, and President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1982 to 1985. Girdwood was drafted to India during World War II where he researched anaemia epidemics amongst British and Indian troops. His research was celebrated by haematologists and published in many volumes, including Davison’s Principles and Practice of Medicine. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to medicine in 1986.

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Video source credits:

• OBJ/ORA/1/5 – Interview: Campbell, Ian (RCPE)

• 'WORLD WAR II: Casualty evacuation by jeep' (Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

• 'WORLD WAR II: Casualty evacuation by jeep' (Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

• OBJ/ORA/1/1 – Interview: Adam, Henry (RCPE)

• 'A soldier within a blood-flask, referring to the army's need of blood-donations.' by Abram Games (Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

• OBJ/ORA/1/18 – Interview: Girdwood, Ronald (RCPE)

• 'The head of a wounded soldier, tense with pain, and blood being transfused; representing the need for blood donors. Colour lithograph after A. Games, 1942.' by Abram Games. (Wellcome Collection, CC BY)

• 'Blood transfusion apparatus, United Kingdom, 1914-1918' (Science Museum, CC BY)

• 'Advertisement for penicillin production from Life magazine' (Science Museum, CC BY)