Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and Their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660

Eric Gruber von Ami. Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and Their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642-1660. The History of Medicine in Context. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001. xv + 283 pp. 111. $69.95 (0-7546-0476-4).

This book is one of several recent volumes that explore caregiving to sick and wounded soldiers, as such arrangements have been shaped by the interplay of peacetime and wartime societies (Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, 2001; Patrick Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans' Welfare State 1860-1900, 1997; among others). Since many of these studies tend to focus on modern conflicts, Justice to the Maimed Soldier is most welcome for its chronological scope, for encouraging comparisons between early-modern and modern arrangements, and for its effort to recover the history of British military nursing before the work of Florence Nightingale.

Eric Gruber von Arni, who is the official historian of Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, aims chiefly to provide "a balanced assessment of the nature, form, availability, quantity...