McIndoe's Army

Completely rewritten, "McIndoe's Army" celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the advanced plastic surgery unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital. It was here that badly burned airmen were treated and cared for during World War Two.

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"More exclusive than Boodle's, Buck's, Whites and the Royal Yacht Squadron rolled into one". This was how Sir Archibald McIndoe, the celebrated plastic surgeon, described The Guinea Pig Club, a unique body of greviously burnt, often seriously disfigured and handicapped Allied airmen treated by McIndoe's team at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. In the Guinea Pig Club's 60th anniversary year the author revises and expands his account of its members' courage, heroism and self generated social and welfare activities around the world since McIndoe's earliest wartime patients founded the Club. He tells how it grew into so much more than a hospital ward Grogging Club in which airmen who had escaped from blazing, exploding and crippled bombers and fighters, drowned their immediate inhibitions. Though not himself a Guinea Pig the author commands the same delicate balance between candour and sympathy, horror and humour which has contributed greatly to the success of the Club and its survival into the new Millennium.