Oxford Military Hospital (Head Injuries)

For the duration of World War II, St. Hugh’s College, which is one of the Colleges which constitutes the University of Oxford and was then for women only, was requisitioned and became a military hospital specialising in head injuries. The women undergraduates were moved into alternative accommodation, left vacant by the departure of the vast majority of male undergraduates to serve in the Armed Forces and brick huts were built all over the main lawns to house wards, occupational therapy units, etc. The College buildings themselves were relatively new, the earliest dating from 1915, the most recent at that time dating from 1936, so they were relatively easy to keep clean, and also were not constructed on a traditional “staircase” system, so movement around them was relatively simple for recuperating patients and their attendant staff. Oxford is close to Brize Norton so the wounded could be flown back from the front and transferred quickly to either St. Hugh’s or the Radcliffe Infirmary. Hugh Cairns, the eminent neurosurgeon, realised that the quicker head wounds were treated, the better the prognosis for the patient, and from St. Hugh’s he sent out Mobile Neurosurgical Units, which performed operations on the injured as close as possible to the battlefront. The patients were then sent back by air for fuller treatment in Oxford. As a result of this and the development of penicillin, used for the first time in England at St. Hugh’s and the Radcliffe Infirmary, the mortality rate for those suffering head injuries dropped from 50% in World War I to 5% in World War II. Oxford also had the Morris car factory at Cowley and Lord Nuffield was persuaded to tool up a set of machinery to produce the metal “Tantalus” plates used in the repair of skull damage. Between 1939 and 1945 some 13,000 patients were treated at St. Hugh’s, which had 300 beds. Not only Allied troops but also prisoners of war benefited from care in the Mobile Neurosurgical Units and at St. Hugh’s.

After the war some of the patients agreed to take part in on-going studies, overseen by Ritchie Russell, Hugh Cairns, and, until her recent death, Freda Newcombe. The projects are still in progress and many important advances in neurosurgery owe their development to these studies.

Athough St. Hugh’s, uniquely for a College library, contains all the medical records for every patient, including X-rays, etc. from the neurosurgical units at the front, these are not available for consultation by anyone other than a genuine medical researcher in the appropriate field. It does, however, also have a general archive of material from the period of the hospital. This includes original photographs, accounts of the hospital from local residents, including children, who remember “taking baskets of cowslips to the patients”, undergraduates who were dispossessed of all but the library and who used to take some of the patients out into Oxford in wheelchairs, patients and their families and some members of staff. It also contains extracts from the diary of a German lady living in Oxford who was asked by the Red Cross to translate for the injured German patients. These accounts are vivid, moving and totally fascinating. The archive also contains one of the original ceramic vessels used in the manufacture of penicillin before mass production became possible.

Those patients who have agreed to participate in on-going research belong to the St. Hugh’s Veterans Association and meet regularly for reunions at St. Hugh’s. As a result of their generosity, St. Hugh’s has a plaque commemorating the work of the original hospital and another commemorating the work on their behalf by Freda Newcombe.

More information on St. Hugh’s can be found at its website, www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk. For details of the archive, email deborah.quare@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk.

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