That the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the militarization of public speech is a natural occurrence, given the symbiosis between war and health care.
Nursing itself began with the Jamaican “doctress” Mary Seacole and the British innovator Florence Nightingale, both of whom tended troops in the Crimean War (1853-56).
Seacole set up a field hospital – her “British Hotel” – behind the front lines, to nourish and succour the afflicted, while Nightingale won fame as “The Lady with the Lamp,” inspecting at night, by lamplight, the wounds of the stricken.
Seacole and Nightingale were among the first frontline workers to assist the fallen.
Currently, we laud hospital staff and medical specialists – surgeons, nurses, doctors, technicians, ambulance paramedics, etc., as frontline workers. Yet, also meriting applause are the cleaners and janitors who are wiping down doorknobs and elevator buttons and other surfaces, and often without either personal protective equipment or prestige.
During the U.S. Civil War, that bard of democracy Walt Whitman contributed to the Union side by relocating from Brooklyn, New York to Washington DC, late in 1862, to become a de facto nurse, due to his compassion for the suffering soldiers he met at the Union camp – which was essentially a field hospital following the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg.
The field hospital was a necessity of the Great War, too. The first Canuck troops to land in France in fall 1914 arrived to set up these hospitals, or so says Frank McKelvey Bell in his 1917 fictionalization of the history, The First Canadians In France: The Chronicle Of A Military Hospital In The War Zone.
In Bell’s recollection, a functioning hospital was set up in Boulogne in two days and received 200 injured soldiers on the first full day of operation.
Another First World War development was the concept of triage, which meant dedicating aid first to those most likely to benefit while providing comfort for the dying.
The idea applies today in ongoing debates about who should receive ventilators (mainly, those most likely to recover from COVID-19 infection) should it come to that.
In the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917, local hospitals were badly damaged and then overrun by thousands of wounded – many mortally.
A field hospital was set up in a train, while a visiting U.S. vessel – the Old Colony – became an instant, floating hospital. (Consider the U.S. hospital ships sent now to New York and California).
On that same occasion, triage was mandatory: To determine whose eyes were merely wounded by flying glass, and whose needed outing what limbs could be axed (or not), and, of course, who should live and who would die.
Another Canadian intervention in frontline medicine, and an extension of the field hospital, is the invention by Dr. Norman Bethune of mobile blood transfusion during the Spanish Civil War, and refined later during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).
So, on our war-footing to combat COVID-19, we are creating field hospitals in sports arenas, hotels and vast public spaces from which the public is now banned we are creating makeshift morgues out of refrigerated trucks we are asking doctors and nurses to practise triage to determine who is ventilated and who may suffocate we are assembling body bags, for we don’t seem to have quite enough masks, gloves, shields or gowns to help preserve all the living.
Some sites are epicentres (or ground zeros) of outbreaks, so they turn into battle zones, and lightly protected (or unprotected) frontline staff undertake suicide missions to treat the suffering.
And sometimes, politicos once derided as backward and/or incompetent now don a Churchill mask as war-time leaders, to transform themselves from hacks to heroes to take on the enemy.
In contrast, like troops under bombardment, citizens must hunker down or effect forms of quarantine, barricading ourselves in and thus prompting tendencies to hoard and ration.
Or, like prisoners, we endure lock-down or police checks to determine if we should be at large or are practising social-distancing while outdoors.
If there is any upside to the militarist and penal-colony vocabulary now in vogue in treating the pandemic, it’ll be in the positive rhetoric of Reconstruction to emerge in the aftermath.
Already, there are overtones of the Great Depression-era with “Big Government,” economic assistance packages openly being touted as “relief.”
These are emergency programs, yes but so was, 80 years ago, Unemployment Insurance.
Another goody of the present crisis is the revival of the idea that governments should spend public money to sustain society and civilization.
Thus, we should be suspicious of the conservative rhetoric of a return to normalcy, which may disarm us – again – when we face the next plague and/or environmental catastrophe.
George Elliott Clarke’s newest book is Portia White: A Portrait In Words (Nimbus), his verse-biography of Canada’s first superstar Black singer.
@nowtoronto
