British surgery in the South African War: the work of Major Frederick Porter.

AT THE onset of this century, two Boer states, the South African Republic, and the Orange Free State, with a combined force of about 87,000 men, were locked in a guerilla war against a British Empire military organization of nearly 450,000 men and 520,000 horses. The Boers' commando tactics enabled them to hold out from October 1899 to May 1902. They were inevitably defeated, but only after an escalation of the war tempting many recent historians to label the conflict as the "British Vietnam". The names of some of the individuals who witnessed that war are more familiar than the war itself. Winston Churchill, then a twenty-five-year-old newspaper correspondent, managed a hair-raising escape from the Boers and achieved world fame overnight.' Cecil Rhodes, with a stake in local diamonds and politics, had an important personal concern in the outcome. Gandhi, then a young lawyer, worked on the battlefield as a stretcher-bearer or "body-snatcher" as the troops referred to his job.3 A. Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was knighted in 1902 for two works defending British policy in the war in which he served as a civilian doctor. The names are familiar, but the war is not. For the military, the Boer or "South African" War was a trial of new weaponry and of tactics. For surgeons, it was a trial of contemporary medicine's effectiveness in dealing with the damages inflicted by the latest instruments of human destruction. For purposes of comparison, the following discussion of Boer War surgical experience includes many references to the nearly contemporaneous conflict, the Spanish-American War of 1898.