Queens Hospital Patients

The injured servicemen were at the centre of all activity at the Queens Hospital, Sidcup. 

They were not just British. The First World War brought in combatants from the armed services of all former British Empire’s Dominion nations. What today we call the Commonwealth.  Eventually there were British, Canadian, New Zealanders and Australian sections at Sidcup, all operating semi-autonomously, but in collaboration. Sometimes they managed each other nation’s patients. 

These injured servicemen became the real “guinea pigs”, the unfortunates upon whom a “strange new art” was being developed by Harold Gillies and his colleagues, the armed forces surgeons of the Commonwealth and  North America. The sheer number of similar patients also meant that a camaraderie developed between them. The inpatients became their own self-help group.  New arrivals would be encouraged by seeing the improvements wrought on those who had preceded them, not least as patients were given sets of their own "before and after" photographs to remind them, and others, of where they had started.

Dr Albert Davis an observer at Sidcup just after the end of the first world war, wrote in the American Journal of Surgery that Gillies and his colleagues were managing “some of the most fantastic deformities that any group of surgeons has been called upon to correct”.