The Medical Corps

Not even a pandemic can slow down one of Canada’s great military historians, Tim Cook. The best-selling author of Vimy: The Battle and the Legend and Shock Troops, which won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction in 2009, Cook spent his lockdown producing a comprehensive account of the “entwinement of the fighting units and the medical services” during the First World War. He had been researching aspects of the Canadian Army Medical Corps for years, but the combination of a global crisis and a personal health scare appears to have been the impetus for his latest excellent and provocative work.

Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War is three stories woven together. Perhaps the most compelling is the first one, about the lifesavers: the over 20,000 individuals who served in the CAMC between 1914 and 1919. That number included about half of the doctors and one-third of the nurses in the...