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The British Sector of the Western Front, 1914–18: Injuries, Treatment and the Trenches

Sources for a Western Front enquiry

  • 3 things to know
  • Paper 1

Overview

Service and medical records, medical cards, unit war diaries and casualty returns, newspapers and censorship under the Defence of the Realm Act, government reports, medical journals, diaries, letters, memoirs and photographs, hospital records, the limits of army statistics, using national and local sources together, and how to plan a follow-up enquiry from a detail in a source.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Key term

What does a soldier's army service and medical record tell a historian about his wounding?

Process

What was attached to a wounded man as he moved back through the treatment stages, and what did it record?

Key term

What are unit war diaries, and why are they useful for a Western Front medical enquiry?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What does a soldier's army service and medical record tell a historian about his wounding?

    Model answer

    Where and when he was wounded, what the injury was, what treatment he was given and which hospitals he passed through.

  2. 2

    What was attached to a wounded man as he moved back through the treatment stages, and what did it record?

    Model answer

    A medical card giving his injury and the treatment already carried out, so that the next stage knew what had been done.

  3. 3

    What are unit war diaries, and why are they useful here?

    Model answer

    Daily records kept by every unit, including medical ones, of where they were and what they did, which show how casualties were handled day by day.

  4. 4

    Why are the army's casualty and admission returns valuable evidence about treatment?

    Model answer

    They show how many men were wounded, what wounded them and how many survived, so the results of a change in treatment can be compared.

  5. 5

    What can national newspapers of the time tell us?

    Model answer

    What the public at home was told about the fighting and the care of the wounded, and how opinion in Britain was shaped.

  6. 6

    Why must a wartime newspaper report be treated with caution?

    Model answer

    Reporting was censored and written to keep morale high, so casualties were played down and failures were left out.

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