Wednesday 7 August 2024, 12:10pm to 1pm
Taiwhanga Kauhau — Auditorium, (lower ground) National Library Wellington. Entrance on Aitken Street or on Zoom.
In this month’s Public History Talk, historian Mark Derby talks about his recent book ‘Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand medical pioneer Douglas Jolly’, and related publications that record New Zealand’s response to the Spanish Civil War, and its present-day significance.
War surgeon Douglas Jolly
Central Otago-born doctor, Doug Jolly, pioneered mobile emergency surgery during the Spanish Civil War. His surgical manual, based on battlefield experiences close to the front line, was widely used in later conflicts.
In this talk , Wellington historian and author Mark Derby will talk about his new book, Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand Medical Pioneer Douglas Jolly, published by Massey University Press/University of Nebraska Press.
Mark makes a case for Dr Jolly to be recognised as one of the most influential medical figures of the 20th century.
The book is part of a long-running, unplanned, and ongoing project to record New Zealand’s response to the Spanish Civil War and its present-day significance.
New Zealanders and the Spanish Civil War
The project began in 2006 when Mark edited a book of seminar papers — Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War (ed. Mark Derby, Canterbury University Press, 2009.) This appeared in a Spanish translation as Compañeros Kiwis — Nueva Zealanda y la Guerra Civil Espanola (University of Castilla- La Mancha, 2011).
Mark later discovered a cache of letters by Christchurch nurse Dorothy Morris in the Alexander Turnbull Library. This resulted in a full-length biography, Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris, New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War (Potton and Burton Publishing / Leeds University Press, 2015.)
Mark has also written about this history for the Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War, a Te Ara-like online resource. The British publisher Bloomsbury has been recently contracted to publish a book based on the Virtual Museum’s content.
In this talk, Mark will speak about these inter-related projects, and how they were produced.
Virtual Museum of the Spanish Civil War
About the speaker
Mark Derby is a New Zealand writer and historian whose work has been published in Britain, Spain, and the United States. His most recent book was an ‘unofficial’ history of Auckland’s Mount Eden Prison which won the 2021 NZ Literary Heritage Award for non-fiction. Mark was a writer for Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of NZ for six years. He has been jailed but never imprisoned, and lives on Wellington’s south coast with three generations of his family.
More information can be found here.