Healing in the aftermath of war
In his essential 2018 book, “Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror,” cultural critic W. Scott Poole identifies trauma — both physical and psychological — arising out of the First World War as a flashpoint for the creation of 20th-century stories of terror. The first war in which the scale of brutality was industrialized and violence was torqued by modern machinery of death, the conflict inflicted brutal tolls on the men who fought it.
“The effects of shrapnel, large-calibre shells, the steel spray of Maxim bullets, and poison gas combined to create a generation of disabled people,” Poole writes. “The terrors of the psyche broken by such conditions cannot be fully hidden. The trauma of the body certainly cannot.”
The sheer number of veterans returning home with life-changing wounds combined with severe psychological damage then called shell-shock (today understood as post-traumatic stress disorder) created a cottage industry for medical professionals charged with treating these soldiers in the hopes of restoring their bodies and minds to some semblance of robustness and utility.
Toronto novelist Kristen den Hartog details some of these endeavours in her new book, “The Roosting Box,” a work of non-fiction that examines the medical care given to veterans of the Great War at the Dominion Orthopedic Hospital, later known as the Christie Street Hospital, in Toronto’s west end. The facility sprang up in a repurposed cash register factory and tended to soldiers beginning in 1919. Den Hartog vividly renders the procedures and practices used to aid ailing veterans, including advances in prostheses.
She illustrates the methods used by inventive surgeons to reconstruct faces. A sculptor was commissioned to create plaster reconstructions of damaged faces to be worn as masks in public.
Then there were the unanticipated ancillary concerns of the time, including the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which den Hartog describes in terms that sound eerily contemporary. “(T)here was plenty of debate as to whether masks were necessary,” she writes. “Many people found them uncomfortable or simply didn’t like being told to wear them, and others took offence that they put the rest of the population at risk for their own sense of personal freedom.”
Some significant historical figures — including painter A.Y. Jackson and Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Frederick Banting — make cameo appearances, but den Hartog is more concerned with the ordinary folk, both patients and hospital staff, who ensured the dayto-day operation of the Christie Street facility. She quotes from diaries and letters to create an intimate pastiche of life on the wards.
Den Hartog uses the metaphor of a roosting box to conceptualize what the hospital represented: “a communal space that provides ideal but temporary shelter for vulnerable beings.”
It’s a striking image for a facility that offered aid and succour to men who befell some of the most grotesque — and, yes, horrific — insults to the human body and mind in modern history.