Treating the Enemy
Year: 2025

Abstract In 1854, Dr Thomson became a national hero for remaining on a Crimean battlefield to treat the wounded Russian enemy. He was celebrated as the embodiment of British Christian humanism in parliament, press, and pulpit. Half a century later, treatment of enemy wounded again became a media sensation; accounts of British forces killing the wounded and leaving them to die of exposure in the Sudan in 1898 sparked a public debate about the extent to which Geneva conventions should apply in con