Frontline Surgeon

“As a doctor I regard war as a terrible thing, but I believe there are things worth fighting for.” The Otago-born surgeon Douglas Jolly wrote these words in a letter to his family in January 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. He had chosen to abandon his specialist studies in surgery and instead travelled to Spain to support its Republican government, which faced a military coup. Thousands of other volunteers also arrived in Spain from at least 50 countries.

Jolly headed a 12-person mobile surgery unit that spent two years working at the front lines of all major battles of the war. He developed ways to treat the injured more rapidly and effectively than in any previous conflict, and was renowned for his courage, decency and  stamina.

After the war Jolly wrote a manual of field surgery, describing the techniques he had developed in Spain. It was widely used by all Allied forces in WWII, and 25 years later was still regarded as essential by NZ medics in the Vietnam War.

Jolly served throughout WWII with Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps, earning a military OBE and the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In civilian life he became medical director of Britain’s largest orthopaedic hospital.

After Jolly died in 1983, his outstanding contributions to emergency surgery were almost forgotten. However, today he is again becoming recognised as one of the greatest war surgeons of the 20th century, and a pioneer of treatment systems used by organisations such as Doctors Without Borders, and in hospital A&E departments around the world.

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Mark Derby is the author of Frontline Surgeon – New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly (Massey University Press, 2024.)