More than Bombs and Bandages, Australian Army nurses at work in World War I

“From now and forever I am in love with all Army nurses. I was brought in yesterday, wounded and feeling frightened, and the first person I saw was a Victorian nurse. She smiled at me and said: ‘Well soldier, I’ll do what I can to help you but you’ll have to look a bit more cheerful.’ I was cheerful from that moment.”
Unknown Soldier

“One boy who is paralized [sic] badly and will only leave the ward when he is carried out for the last time could not talk much. A Sister just stood by him quietly and stroked his forehead and ‘crooned’ in gentle words to him. I could have kissed her hand for the beautiful thing she did.”
Padre David Garland

More than Bombs and Bandages exposes the false assumption that military nurses only nursed. Based on author Kirsty Harris’ CEW
Bean Prize winning PhD thesis, this is a book that is far removed
from the ‘devotion to duty’ stereotyping offering an intriguing and
sometimes gut wrenching insight into the Australian Army Nursing
Service (AANS) during World War I.

Both evidence-rich and personal, More than Bombs and Bandages
focuses on the individuals using their own words and recollections to
illustrate the vast array of roles and skills the AANS had during the
Great War. Harris draws on personal diaries, interviews, service
records, hospital diaries and autobiographies to create an absorbing
and meticulously constructed book.

The book incorporates a wide variety of topics including:
• ‘care and comfort’ nursing as a key difference between civilian
and military nursing
• nursing in remote locations such as German East Africa and
the North West Frontier of India
• the impact of war wounds and war-based diseases on
nursing work
• the breadth of roles military nurses had outside the normal
sphere of nursing


More than Bombs and Bandages provides rich pickings for all
those interested in nursing history, women in the Australian military
the application of medical treatments and World War I.
Kirsty Harris, has both an academic and military background. She is an accomplished historian who has undertaken
a considerable amount of reconstructive work to create the robust database of information and little known facts
that underpin More than Bombs and Bandages. She hopes that her work will allow those both inside and outside
the nursing world to gain a better appreciation of the work these nurses did during World War I.