George Feggetter (nonfiction)
George Young Feggetter (1905 – 2000) was a British urologist who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War 2.
Feggetter became interested in urology after working with George Grey Turner (1877–1951) in his native Newcastle. Feggetter subsequently furthered his uro- logical training with a visit to Alexander von Lichtenberg (1880–1949) in Berlin in 1933, who had pioneered intravenous urography. Feggetter then worked under Edward Canny Ryall (1865-1934) and with Terence Millin (1903–1980) who were pioneering Transurethral Resection of Prostate (TURP) at All Saints Hospital in London before the war. He published one of the earliest British papers on TURP9 and in 1936 wrote a review on bladder outflow obstruction whilst First Surgical Assistant to the British Postgraduate Medical School.
On the outbreak of war Feggetter worked in the Emergency Medical Service on the home front then joined the RAMC in 1942. He was posted to North Africa as part of Operation Torch.
Feggetter bequeathed his war diary ("Diary of an RAMC Surgeon at War, 1942-1946") to the Imperial War Museum. The detailed is a detailed account of his activities during the war. Excerpts appear in the War Diary series in the Gnomon Chronicles:
- [[1]]
British General Hospital: Operation TORCH
On 23rd May 1942 I was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps and after the obligatory two weeks preliminary training course for the medical officers at No. 11 depot at Becketts Park, Leeds, followed by a week's instruction in military hygiene at Mytchett [?], I was posted as surgical specialist with the rank of major to the 69th British General Hospital mobilising at Ormskirk.
The introduction course in barracks at Leeds consisted of a concentrated series of lectures on all aspects of the role of the R.A.M.C. in war, with details of organisation of the army and command structure, King's regulations, discipline, military law, and everything pertaining to the care of troops from clothing, equipment and pay. Before and after lectures there as a great deal of important practical work, army drill, marching, recognition of bugle calls and regimental band tunes, map reading with use of compass. There was hard physical training, organized games and field exercises including one that lasted all night. The syllabus was full but one hour of drill time was devoted to saluting, at rest, when walking, and on the march - even stick drill the remembrance of which later provoked a wry smile when one of our officers who had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp was posted to us and recounted how among other things with other officers, he had been subjected to a propaganda film comparing the training of German officers with that of the British. Germans were depicted undergoing very tough training attacking an enemy post with hand grenades against live ammunition after scaling a cliff with ropes. The alternative film showed British offers being taught the mysteries of stick drill!
The physical training at Leeds was strenuous, especially for those of us who had been so overworked in civilian hospitals since the start of the war that there had not been time for any form of recreational exercise: apart from routine drills and marching there were the unaccustomed toughening up processes, indoor and outdoor gymnastics, exercises carrying telegraph poles, running, jumping, tug-of-war, ball games and the like; but it was the daily 'square bashing' wearing new army boots and gaiters that was particularly trying on the feet, and I developed acute bilateral Achilles tendinitis which made me sympathetic in later months with those soldiers who suffered from it and reported 'unfit for duty'."