The 1st Southern General Military Hospital, Edgbaston

Description:This photograph shows nurses on the Edgbaston site of the 1st Southern General Hospital treating wounded soldiers in an open-air ward. From the outset of the war Robert Saundby (a professor of Medicine at the University of Birmingham) had strongly favoured open-air treatment of injuries as well as infections, because ‘fresh air is the best tonic, the best antiseptic’.<small>¹</small> Noting that the university buildings at ‘Bournbrook, Birmingham, have been transformed at very considerable expense into a hospital of 600 beds, but it is likely that many more will be needed’, he recommended new annexes of brick, wood and asbestos sheeting to ‘furnish shelter without diminishing that supply of pure air and light which is necessary to health’.

Within military medicine, the view was widely held that ‘during the present war open-air treatment has played a large part in the cure of wounded soldiers ... excellent results can be obtained by this method, especially in the more serious kinds of suppurating wounds and in cases of general infection’.<small>²</small> The scientist AE Shipley (1861–1927), having inspected a military hospital, judged that the open-air treatment of sick and wounded soldiers was particularly successful for those with pneumonia.<small>³</small> A reviewer of Shipley’s pamphlet observed that ‘the only people who felt the cold at the hospital were apparently the nurses, the patients having comfortable beds with plenty of blankets and hot-water bottles’.<small>⁴</small> Nearer the front, the army used casualty tents; the military surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Sir Berkeley Moynihan considered that ‘in the treatment of all gunshot wounds where the septic processes are raging, and the temperature varies through several degrees, an immense advantage will accrue from placing patients out of doors’.<small>⁵</small>

However, opinion was divided; for instance Gilbert Barling (Birmingham University Professor of Medicine and consulting surgeon to the Southern General hospital) remained sceptical, concluding that ‘as far as the well-doing of the wounded is concerned, it has yet to be shown that one system gives better results than the other under modern conditions’.<small>⁶</small> Surviving photographs of the military hospital on the Edgbaston campus show that both options were pursued and that indoor and outdoor wards were added. In the Birmingham War Hospitals ‘it was decided to build four wards of 60 beds each at Rubery and eight at Hollymoor, the front blocks being in each case of the open air type, the others of the closed type’.<small>⁷</small> Open-air treatment was also adopted at auxiliary hospitals, so that Lawrence Levy found at Kings Heath in June 1917 that ‘the beds, with their wounded occupants, were already out in the huge quadrangle, which was in pre-war time the big playground of the School’, and in May 1918 that the University ‘space wherein the shows were given in previous years in the open was now entirely utilised for tent-bed accommodation’.<small>⁸</small>


<font color="#666633"><small>¹ Robert Saundby, ‘Open air hospitals in war time’, British Medical Journal, Vol.2, 19 September 1914, pp.493-494; also published in The Lancet, Vol.184, No.4751, 19 September 1914, pp.759-761; offprint in Birmingham Archives & Heritage: Birmingham Authors D/3
² W. Ernest Nelson, ‘Open-air treatment for wounds’, British Medical Journal, Vol.2, 28 August 1915, p.324
³ A.E. Shipley, The Open-Air Treatment of the Wounded (The First Eastern General Hospital), (London: Country Life Library, 1915)
⁴ ‘A Military Open-air Hospital’, British Medical Journal, Vol.2, 12 June 1915, pp.1015-1016
⁵ B. Moynihan, ‘An Address on the Treatment of Gunshot Wounds’, British Medical Journal, Vol.1, 4 March 1916, pp.333–339 [http://www.bmj.com/content/1/2879/333.full.pdf+html]
⁶ Gilbert Barling, ‘The 1st Southern General Hospital’, British Journal of Surgery, Vol.2 Issue 7, 1914, pp.505-509
⁷ War Hospital Committee Minutes, 24 November 1915
⁸ Edward Lawrence Levy, Bucking up “the boys” by the “B.A.C.”, (Birmingham: Hammond, 1921)</small></font>