Sylvia Martin reviews Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly by Mark Derby for Recorder:
‘Mark Derby’s biography of Dr Doug Jolly jumps straight into the action in Spain in 1937, setting the scene for an engaging and thought-provoking book that is timely today. The first chapter asks why this prominent surgeon in the International Brigade medical units during the Spanish Civil War remains virtually unknown in his own country. It also adds to the growing body of works about volunteers from the Antipodes, including Derby’s own Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Judith Keene’s The Last Mile to Huesca about Australian nurse, Agnes Hodgson, and Ink in Her Veins, my biography of Australian interpreter and administration worker, Aileen Palmer.
Born in 1904, Jolly grew up in a close-knit Presbyterian family in the small Central Otago town of Cromwell on New Zealand’s south island. His father, the town’s storekeeper, was killed in France in World War I when Jolly was twelve, leaving his mother to care for seven children on a war widows’ pension. At Otago University Medical School, he became active in the Student Christian Movement where, under the influence of Rev. Donald Grant, he developed the non-doctrinal practice of Christian socialism that he would follow all his life. In 1932, he left for England to pursue post-graduate studies in surgery, staying with Grant and his wife Irene, who had returned to London. The couple would become his long-term emotional support, Irene also his lover as well as friend.
Although he had not completed his final oral examination for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons, something that would cost him dearly in later life, Jolly left his studies to become a volunteer to support the Republican government in Spain in December 1936. Armed with a letter from Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the British Communist Party, declaring that he was ‘a fully qualified surgeon’ and ‘a warm sympathiser with the cause of the Spanish government’, he was accepted instantly at Brigade headquarters in Albacete.
For the next gruelling two years, Doug Jolly worked with the medical units of the International Brigades, setting up mobile field hospitals close to the war's major fronts. He specialised in abdominal surgery and was a pioneer in trauma medicine. During his time on the front lines, he contributed to some of the war’s most significant medical advances, including establishing blood banks and using blood transfusions. He also played a key role in the development of the systematic positioning of each successive stage of treatment so that injured troops could be admitted and treated within hours.
Whether in extreme heat or freezing winds and snow,often operating by torch or candlelight in the makeshift theatres set up in tents or derelict buildings, the seemingly tireless Dr Jolly retained his calm and agreeable manner.Highly regarded by all members of his equipo wherever he worked, he was even praised by other surgeons as ‘the best surgeon we had’.
Despite the dedicated efforts of the Republican forces and the thousands who offered their lives to what they perceived to be a ‘just war’ against Fascism, General Franco and his mercenaries, backed by the power of the new weapons of war being trialled by the forces of Mussolini and Hitler, eventually prevailed. Barcelona fell in January 1939 and Madrid two months later.
The Spanish people were those who suffered the most and Derby quotes the words of Aileen Palmer, who was part of his team in most of the major battles, as she wrote to her family in Australia in 1938 describing ‘the painful pilgrimages’ all along the roads, ‘uprooted Spaniards trekking eastwards to the coast…with their ramshackle mule-drawn carts piled up with mattresses, bits of furniture…women carrying children and making the long journey by foot…the whole world they knew turned into a heap of dust and crumbled shards.’ The images she evokes could be those we see nightly on our television screens.
When Jolly returned to London at the end of 1938 to briefly recuperate before setting off back to New Zealand to see his family and embark on a nation-wide speaking tour to bring attention to the plight of Republican refugees and International Brigade prisoners. In England again,where he would settle for the rest of his life, he wrote an influential book, Field Surgery in Total War, and once again joined the theatre of war for the duration of World War II.After the war, he held positions of authority in London hospitals but, after failing the final examination for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1947, lost the eligibility to perform surgery in peacetime.
Jolly was an unassuming man who never sought the limelight, but he also harboured a ‘dark secret’ that became increasingly debilitating as he aged. From his early days, he had suffered crippling mood swings, known then as manic-depression. Like Aileen Palmer, he had a family history of what would now be called bipolar disorder. Unlike Palmer, who suffered periodic incarcerations in psychiatric hospitals in later life, Jolly found some relief in the new drug lithium. But, as Mark Derby observes: ‘The many oblique references in letters from Irene Grant and others to his periods of bedridden illness from the late 1940s can be read as evidence of his decreasing ability to function normally, let alone exceptionally, once the stimulus of wartime was denied to him.’ Douglas Jolly married at the age of sixty and died in England in 1983.
Sylvia Martin is the award-winning author of three biographies about under-recognised Australian women.’
