The ABCs of survival behind barbed wire: experience in the Far East, 1941-45.

The Paterson Lectureship was created by Associated Medical Services some years ago to support the annual program of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, and to recognize the contributions made by G. R. Paterson to the CSHM while he was Executive Director of the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine. I thank the selection committee ; I am honored to be invited to be the AMS/Paterson Lecturer for 1999, and hope that I can approach the high standard set by my distinguished predecessors. For many years now I have been investigating a somewhat obscure facet of our wide-ranging field of medical history. My intent is to report, as it were, on what I have been doing. On 25 December 1941, Hong Kong surrendered to the forces of the Imperial Japanese Army; the survivors became prisoners and remained so until mid 1945. In the past, the many accounts of these events have been presented, historiographically, as political or military history. My thesis is that the Hong Kong story, most particularly that portion that began on Christmas Day and ended only 44 months later-the prisoner of war period-should be seen not as political history or as military history, but predominantly as medical history. Approximately 6,000 Allied soldiers became prisoners of war at Hong Kong, including 1500 members of the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada, the latter a nominally English-speaking regi