Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War

The perception of medical care on the Great War battlefield recalls scenes from the American Civil War fifty years earlier: blood-soaked surgeons hacking off limbs with grim determination as broken men crawled into their dirty operating rooms. This couldn't be more wrong.

Medical care in almost all armies, and especially in the Canadian medical services, was sophisticated and constantly evolving, with vastly more wounded soldiers saved than lost. After the war, the hard lessons learned by civilian doctors who were temporarily in military uniform were brought back to Canada. A new Department of Health created guidelines in the aftermath of the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which had killed 50,000 Canadians and millions around the world. In a grim irony, the fight to save soldiers' lives and improve civilian health was furthered by the most destructive war up to that point in human history.

But medical advances were not the only thing brought back from Europe: Life Savers and Body Snatchers exposes the shocking story of the exploitation of human body parts during the Great War. Tim Cook has spent over a decade investigating the hidden history of Canadian medical doctors harvesting the body parts of slain Canadian soldiers and transporting their brains, lungs, bones, and other tissue or bones to the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London. At least 1,200 individual Canadian body parts were removed from dead soldiers and sent to London, where they were stored, treated, and some put on display in exhibition galleries at the RCS. After being exhibited there, the body parts were displayed several times in both Montreal and Hamilton in the early 1920s.

Life Savers and Body Snatchers will be the definitive medical history of the Canadian forces in the Great War, and a broader look into the medical advances that came from the carnage.