Graham Butler - Writing the History of the Australian ArmyMedical Corps in WW1.

The First World War marked a watershed in the history of military medicine and surgery. It was a ferocious encounter with enormous numbers of casualties and, at its conclusion, Colonel Graham Butler believed that the Australian casualty records constituted a body of accurate statistical material that was unequalled, surpassing that of Britain. His firm conviction was that the clinical records of every Australian battle or non-battle casualty had been forwarded to the Medical Research Council in Britain, where a large team of clerks had been busy abstracting, coding and tabulating the figures from the field medical cards for later statistical and epidemiological analysis.

Regrettably, he was to be proved wrong. In 1922, Butler reluctantly accepted the position of editor-in-chief for the medical history, and it was not long before he became aware of the parlous state of the records for the period covering the arrival of Australian troops in Egypt in December 1914, until March 1916 when AIF headquarters was transferred to England. The situation was in fact far worse, and it would later be revealed that most of the medical records had either been destroyed, or did not exist. Graham Butler would completely underestimate the work involved in documenting the history of the AAMC during the First World War. However, he was not entirely to blame. In this paper I will argue that the official historian, CEW Bean, and the two other members of the Medical History Board, Major-General Neville Howse and General CBB White, should also shoulder some of the responsibility for the fact that the history took almost twenty years to complete and not the three as planned.

Kerry Highley worked as a haematologist for twenty years before returning to university to study history at the ANU. She received her BA (Hons) in 2004 and her PhD in the History of Medicine in 2009 for her study on the history of the polio epidemics in Australia. She is the author of “Mending Bodies: Polio Treatment in Australia” and other conference papers on polio and Elizabeth Kenny. In 2012, she received a grant from the Australian Army History Unit to research (Arthur) Graham Butler