More Than Bombs and Bandages by Kirsty Harris

Author:Kirsty Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

AWM H13944: Fannie Eleanor Williams at work in her laboratory, 3 AGH Lemnos.

Major Charles J. Martin, AAMC, an eminent British scientist and former Director of the Lister Institute in London, directed research primarily concerned with the bacteriological problems rife in the Middle East. Requiring a technician, he chose Miss Williams who was working in the 3 AGH pathology department directed by the renowned Melbourne surgeon, Dr William Upjohn.103 After four strenuous months, she was a highly effective bacteriologist and an expert in the serological investigation of dysentery patients.104

The work of 3 AGH produced an almost immediate demand for specific diagnostic and curative sera for military purposes.105 Sister Williams transferred to England with 3 AGH, then later worked at the Central Laboratory in 1917 (the Lister Institute in its wartime form), detecting and isolating carriers of cerebro-spinal fever in the staff at AIF Headquarters.106 Sister Williams also collaborated with Colonel Martin in critical studies on dysentery on the Western Front which produced important results.107 They made vital observations on the serological diagnosis of dysentery, particularly the distinction between shiga dysentery and other groups.108 Williams later worked at 2 AAH Southall and 25 BSH in France. During the outbreaks of Spanish Influenza, she made a further impression on the medical community with her investigations on epidemic influenza.109 A.G. Butler claimed that this work, begun on Lemnos and continued at Rouen, ranked ‘among the most valuable contributions in the medical researches of the war’.110 Sister Williams co-authored several papers during the war and, for her contributions in this field, the AIF awarded her the Associate Royal Red Cross in February 1917.111

Most AANS nurses were familiar with typhoid (enteric fever). Although the incidence of typhoid fever had diminished in Australia, patients with the disease appeared in most hospitals and probationers commonly found questions on the treatment of the disease in nursing association exams. Stewart and Cuff emphasised typhoid in training, as ‘the greatest care is needed in the feeding and handling of the patient in view of the possibility of haemorrhage and perforation.’112 However, in the military environment, the AANS discovered new strains of typhoid. Beatrice Russell realised that the disease they were treating ‘was not like the old typhoid one knew’.113 Consequently, Leila Smith, also at Choubra Infectious Hospital in 1915, noted that each medical officer had different methods of treatment:

Bennett [Dr Agnes Bennett from NZ] fed her typhoids on anything they liked almost, all through. Capt Rankin, kept his on little besides Albm [sic - albumen] water and Glaxo. We reckoned they got up more wasted than Bennetts.114

Fortunately, anti-typhoid inoculation protected most allied troops and the number of those who succumbed and the rate of mortality dropped to what Thurstan reported as ‘an almost insignificant figure’.115 Despite this, late in 1915, 1 AGH had almost seventy cases at one time.116 May Tilton reported:

Eight hundred patients were admitted in a few days, and in our section they increased to two hundred and ten, mostly enteric fever and dysentery patients, running alarming temperatures of 106 degrees.

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