LIFESAVERS AND BODY SNATCHERS
Captain Lawrence J. Rhea was an experienced pathologist who conducted hundreds of autopsies on slain soldiers at the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital, opening up their bodies to investigate the devastating effects of metal on bone, muscle, and organs. “We have held a post mortem examination on most of the cases that have died in the wards of this unit,” Rhea reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Rhea and other scientist-physicians noted life-saving surgical techniques and tactics to combat infection, and they made recommendations to improve patients’ care, treatment, and protection. In one early 1916 study, Rhea removed the brains of fourteen soldiers who had died as a result of shell fragments, concluding that steel helmets would have saved lives. Canadian soldiers were issued steel helmets beginning in April 1916.
While this dissection of the soldiers’ slain bodies was important to the medical war, Canadian and British doctors went one shocking step further. In a desire to learn from the dead, doctors harvested soldiers’ body parts — including brains, lungs, and other organs — to be used as teaching tools. While there was no concept of consent at the time, the soldiers’ next of kin were not told that their loved ones had body parts removed and sent to the
Royal College of Surgeons in London, England, to be put on display.
McGill professor George Adami — who served as a colonel with the Canadian Army Medical Corps and was occasionally attached to No. 3 General Hospital — was very keen to have soldiers’ body parts preserved in Canada. He used his considerable influence to ensure that hundreds of body parts were sent back to McGill University during and after the war.
This disturbing practice was part of the medical learning process, and yet it clashed violently with the commemorative impulse after the war to build memorials to the fallen soldiers. As the words “lest we forget” were invoked time and time again — and as thousands of memorials were built across the country and cemeteries were created for the fallen overseas — McGill University students were learning to become doctors by using harvested soldiers’ body parts. This continued until the late 1950s, when the soldiers’ remaining organs were unceremoniously destroyed.
More information on the harvesting of soldiers’ body parts by medical practitioners during the Great War can be found in my book Lifesavers and Body Snatchers.