Description

Title: More than Bombs and Bandages – Australian Army nurses at work in World War I

Author: Harris, Kirsty

Condition: Mint

Edition: 1st Edition

Publication Date: 2011

ISBN: 9780980814057

Cover: Hard Cover with Dust Jacket – 344 pages

Comments: More than Bombs and Bandages exposes the false assumption that military nurses only nursed. Based on author Kirsty Harris’ CEW Bean Prize winning PhD thesis, this is a book that is far removed from the ‘devotion to duty’ stereotyping offering an intriguing and sometimes gut-wrenching insight into the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during World War I.

Both evidence-rich and personal, More than Bombs and Bandages focuses on the individuals, using their own words and recollections to illustrate the vast array of roles and skills the AANS had during the Great War. Harris draws on personal diaries, interviews, service records, hospital diaries and autobiographies to create an absorbing and meticulously constructed book.

The book incorporates a wide variety of topics including:

• ‘care and comfort’ nursing as a key difference between civilian and military nursing

• nursing in remote locations such as German East Africa and the North West Frontier of India

• the impact of war wounds and war-based diseases on nursing work

• the breadth of roles military nurses had outside the normal sphere of nursing

More than Bombs and Bandages provides rich pickings for all those interested in nursing history, women in the Australian military and the application of medical treatments and World War I.

Kirsty Harris, has both an academic and military background. She is an accomplished historian who has undertaken a considerable amount of reconstructive work to create the robust database of information and little known facts that underpin More than Bombs and Bandages. She hopes that her work will allow those both inside and outside the nursing world to gain a better appreciation of the work these nurses did during World War I.

Includes – Locations where AANS members served, names of nurses and their training hospitals