Page 26 - QARANC Vol 20 No 3 2023

26 The Gazette QARANC Association
Bringing history to life at
The Museum of Military Medicine
From Florence Nightingale to Dame Margo Turner, Gazette Editor Steve Bax discovers the rich history of military nursing on a visit to the Corps’ museum
Based at Keogh Barracks in Hampshire, the Museum of Military Medicine exists to engender a sense of ‘esprit de corps’ – or as Director Jason Semmens puts it when we meet in late November, “continuity, tradition, and regimental pride.”
It’s a windswept, autumn day and I’ve made the journey to Aldershot to learn more about the QARANC’s official corps museum. I find it situated in a building that was formerly used as the barracks’ cinema, until 1982. Jason leads the small team here, managing the museum, its collections and shop. He has kindly agreed to give me a tour, but before that there’s time for a quick history lesson.
“In the second half of the 20th century, all four corps of the Army Medical Services set up their own museums,” explains Jason. “The oldest was the RAMC Historical Museum, founded in 1952, followed by the QARANC museum in 1955. Because of rationalisation, in 1999 all four collections came together and amalgamated into the Army Medical Services Museum.
“At the suggestion of the then Chair of the Board of Trustees, QARANC Representative Colonel Commandant, Col Rosemary Kennedy, in 2016, we became the Museum of Military Medicine. The name recognises that the Defence Medical Services, of which the AMS is a part, is tri-service.”
The tour follows a chronological route where the stories of the four corps are interwoven. It begins in the civil war years of the 1640s where military
Men were nursing orderlies and women weren’t really employed as nurses as such until 19th Century
hospitals were set up by the parliamentary side. Jason points out a uniformed mannequin with a paper-coated object between his teeth. “The powder cartridges they had required reasonable dentition for a musketeer to pull off the end of the paper canister. This is meaning of the phrase, ‘to bite the bullet.’ You had to have good enough teeth.”
Most other military museums start in 1660, when the standing army was established after restoration of the monarchy. However, military hospitals in the English Civil War employed nurses, though not regarded as military nurses, so the museum takes its story back that little bit further.
Jason explains: “Men were nursing orderlies and women weren’t really employed as nurses as such until 19th Century.”
We move to the Napoleonic era, when the Army Medical Department got organised properly for the first time. Prior to that most regiments would have had their own surgeon or medical officer, I learned, but the army was always keen to ensure it had surgeons or doctors on hand.
I found the display of Charles Bell watercolours really engaging. Bell was a surgeon who tended the wounded from the Battle of Waterloo and made illustrations which he worked up into watercolours afterwards. We take for granted today that we have photographs but back then this would have been the only way to record these.