19 - 23 September, St Stephen’s Church, High Street, Exeter
During the First World War ambulance trains with carriages full of wounded soldiers, 100 or 200 cases at a time, pulled in regularly to Exeter’s Queen Street Station where stretcher cases were unloaded and the ‘walking wounded’ helped to the ambulances.
The soldiers had come via Southampton from the Western Front. Some had wounds caused by shots, grenades and shell fire, or were suffering from the effects of mustard gas. Some had problems such as ‘trench foot’ caused by long immersion in the muddy water of the trenches.
Now a new exhibition in Exeter tells the story of how these soldiers were looked after in eight temporary war hospitals. Buildings as different as chapel schoolrooms and the bishop’s palace were taken over and turned into wards and treatment rooms. In all 35,000 soldiers were treated in the Red Cross hospitals throughout the war.
‘We’re so used to what modern medicine can do for the injured and sick’, said research co-ordinator Dr Julia Neville. ‘that it is hard to imagine just how limited the options were for treatment in the First World War’. One of the features of the exhibition will be a clinical area with a model of a patient receiving what was the most up-to-date treatment for wound infection in 1917, a system developed in France which Exeter was one of the first cities to adopt.
The exhibition take place between Tuesday 19 September, when it will be opened by the Lord Mayor of Exeter, Councillor Lesley Robson, and Saturday 23 September in St Stephen’s Church, High Street, Exeter.
Further details of opening hours at https://www.exeterlocalhistorysociety.co.uk/world-war-1-hospitals-exhibi...
Please contact Julia Neville, Research Co-ordinator, for further information via j.f.neville@btinternet.com or 01392-461157.
