His finest hour? Churchill’s skin graft for injured officer
HE offered up his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ in a famous speech to the House of Commons as the horrors of the Second World War unfolded.
Yet Winston Churchill might have added his own skin to that list in his morale-boosting 1940 speech to MPs.
For 42 years earlier, in his days as an Army officer, Sir Winston had donated a skin graft from his arm to help a badly wounded comrade in north Africa – and save a nurse from having to do so instead.
A sword strike had severed the muscles of Richard Molyneux during the 21st Lancers’ skirmishes with the Dervish warriors at the 1898 Battle of Omdurman in the deserts of Sudan. ‘It was a horrible gash, and the doctor was anxious that it should be skinned over as soon as possible,’ Sir Winston reportedly said.
‘He said something in a low tone to the nurse, who bared her arm. They retired into a corner, where he began to cut a piece of skin off her to transfer to Molyneux’s wound. The poor nurse blanched, and the doctor turned upon me.’
Sir Winston, 23 at the time, then described how the doctor – a ‘great, raw-boned Irishman’ – told him: ‘Oi’ll have to take it off you.’
‘There was no escape, and as I rolled up my sleeve he added genially, “Ye’ve hear of a man being flayed aloive? Well this is what it feels loike”. He then proceeded to cut a piece of skin and some flesh about the size of a shilling from the inside of my forearm.’
It was, he added, ‘a beautiful piece of skin with a thin layer of flesh attached to it’. Grafted to his fellow officer’s wound, it did him ‘lasting good’, while Sir Winston kept the scar as a ‘souvenir’.
The details of our wartime leader’s earlier heroics are reported by a team of doctors in an article about the history of skin grafting.
The team from the University of Miami, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, and Thomas Jefferson University, used newspaper reports from the time.
They said the way Sir Winston described the procedure suggests it was likely to have been a ‘full thickness’ graft, a relatively new procedure at the time, introduced a decade earlier by eye surgeon John Reissberg Wolfe in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclaw.
‘Although Winston Churchill did not expect to be a skin graft donor, he rose to the occasion and came to the rescue of a wounded colleague, although with modesty and humour he implies that the situation left him little choice in the matter,’ said the doctors in the medical journal Clinics in Dermatology. ‘He deserves much credit for his skin graft donation.’
Sir Winston’s time in the Army began in 1895 when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars.
He fought in Cuba and India before joining General Kitchener’s Anglo-Sudan War campaign as a subaltern in the 21st Lancers cavalry regiment.
In common with many of his overseas postings, he also worked as a journalist alongside his military role, reporting back on the war for The Morning Post.
The year after the Battle of Omdurman, he embarked upon his political career.
‘Cut off flesh the size of a shilling’