British Military Medicine during the New Zealand Wars 1845-1866.

The New Zealand Wars were a series of conflicts between the British Imperial Forces (and, latterly, New Zealand’s colonial forces) and the indigenous Māori people of Aotearoa / New Zealand. They spanned approximately 27 years between 1845 and 1872, although most of the British infantry forces left in 1866, leaving the last years of the conflict to the New Zealand colonial forces with limited support from a small remainder of infantry and artillery, engineering and hospital units. It would be incorrect to think that there was conflict for the entire time. The war is more accurately described as a series of discrete but sometimes overlapping campaigns, fought in separate geographical locations against different Māori groups for subtly different reasons, but against the same overarching background issues – land and sovereignty.

While the New Zealand Wars have been extensively studied and their place in New Zealand history reconsidered in recent decades, there has been limited examination of the associated military medicine. Each subsequent war New Zealand has been involved with (from the Boer War to Vietnam) has benefited from a detailed official or unofficial published history detailing the medical aspects of the campaigns and a clinical overview of the medicine practised, and a reflection on its place in New Zealand’s military medical history. But this is not the case for the New Zealand Wars. There has been very little scholarly interest in the medical care provided during the New Zealand Wars. The two seminal multi- volume works examining the histories of the British Army Medical Department and Royal Navy make scant reference to the New Zealand wars – with the former devoting three out of nearly 1800 pages to the New Zealand Wars and the latter, nothing.

In this thesis, I will investigate the practice of military medicine in the British units engaged in the New Zealand Wars. How the medical services were organised, the critical medical events of the conflict, the wounds, injuries and deaths from combat, and the significant burden of non-combat illness, injuries and fatalities. I will also examine the concept of sanitation as being essential to the health of the troops, which was a new concept within the Imperial forces, with the New Zealand Wars being the first conflict where Sanitation Officers were appointed to the force. In addition, I will examine where the New Zealand conflicts sit within the wider history of British military medicine in the early to mid-19th century, particularly the differing nature of the conflict in New Zealand compared with other conflicts.