Untold stories of an overlooked NZ medical pioneer revealed

In Book Takes, authors share three things readers will gain from their books as well as giving an insight into what they learnt during the researching and writing. This weekend, Mark Derby talks about writing a biography of one of New Zealand’s unsung heroes in Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly.

Writer and historian Mark Derby came across Douglas Jolly nearly two decades ago while writing Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. While Derby continued writing about a range of other subjects – Rua Kēnana, John Cullen, white-collar unions and an award-winning history of Mt Eden Prison – he couldn’t help thinking about Jolly.

He found it staggering that Jolly, who pioneered mobile emergency surgery during the Spanish Civil War and has been described as “one of the most notable war surgeons of the 20th century”, was all but forgotten at home in NZ.

The more Derby learned about Jolly, the more he came to like him.

“He was a great singer at parties, and would perform his school haka in the middle of an operating theatre to inspire his exhausted colleagues... He insisted on operating first on his most critically injured patients, even when they were troops from the opposing side. He carried out more complex abdominal operations in Spain than most surgeons see in their entire career yet was not permitted to practise surgery in peace time.”

Here’s what Derby believes readers will find most interesting about Frontline Surgeon.

Doug Jolly’s international reputation as surgical pioneer:

Jolly came from the small town of Cromwell in Central Otago, and in the Spanish Civil War and World War II he proved to be a brilliant, courageous and greatly dedicated surgeon. In 1940, he wrote a manual to pass on the lessons from his recent experience in Spain. Emeritus professor Sir Paul Preston, perhaps the most distinguished historian of the Spanish Civil War, says that this book “provided crucial instruction for British and American surgeons during the Second World War”.

Yet today, Jolly is barely remembered in his country of birth and isn’t mentioned in our official war histories. Redressing that surprising gap in our national memory, and understanding the reasons for it, were my main motivations for writing this book.