In the Name of the Martyrs
ABSTRACT This article explores how the Francoist victors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) remembered their dead. Eschewing a top-down approach alone, it also looks at the reception and production of memory from below. In this way, the article shows how many of the Francoist bereaved both came to identify with and gained solace from the regime's message that it was involved in a sacred struggle against centre and left political groups. Moreover, many ordinary Francoists came to believe that taking part in the repression of those from the defeated side could offer a way of honouring their dead.
Medicine and the Spanish Civil War.
The very moving exhibition ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ mounted by the Imperial War Museum from November 2001 until April 2002 reminds us all too appositely of the horrors of warfare. The loss of life suffered as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War has been estimated as perhaps half a million1 and the scale of mutilation and disease attributable to it was colossal. If the First World War was the first major war in which casualties inflicted by direct military action outnumbered those caused by disease2, the Spanish Civil War may well have been the first in which civilian losses exceeded those of combatants. One of the very few redeeming features of warfare may be that it can stimulate progress in various aspects of medicine and surgery. Although medical historians have cast doubt on this belief3, the Spanish Civil War may offer some support for it. 
 
The uprising began with a military coup in which the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco soon gained control of sizeable areas of the country. The government (Republicans) responded by melding the militia columns into a popular army. 
 
Apart from the army medical branch, which almost entirely supported the insurgents from the outset4, the majority of doctors continued to practise their profession wherever they happened to be located at the outbreak of hostilities, without distinguishing between the loyalties of their patients. A few were executed early in the proceedings—by the rebels because they were thought to be Freemansons, or by one or other of the government factions because they were thought to be Catholics. Some were called up, some volunteered, some continued in civilian practice, but the distinction between military and civilian medicine became very blurred: front-line army mobile hospitals accepted sick and wounded civilians, and wounded soldiers were often evacuated back to rearguard civilian hospitals5,6,7. Doctors not in uniform often found that the town in which they were working would fall to the opposing side, but victimization of this group was surprisingly uncommon in a war in which reprisals were swift and bloody: this was largely because of the impartial stance of the profession and the need for medical expertise.
War Surgery in Spain * (i) Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures. J. Trueta. Hamish Hamilton & Co. (ii) "War Surgery in Spain." Tudor Hart. British Medical Journal, 1939, i., p. 1099.
Although the anticipated bombing attacks on our towns and seaports have not taken place, everyone realizes that it would be too sanguine to jump to the conclusion that we are free for ever from the menace: and medical practitioners even in the West of England should know what lines of treatment ought to be followed if they find themselves called upon to deal with numerous casualties during or just after a raid. It is curious that experience in one war appears to be almost valueless in the next. Treatment of wounds of the chest and of the abdomen was quite different in the South African War and in the Great War. The methods that proved most valuable in Madrid and Barcelona during the recent fighting in Spain would have been considered revo