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Douglas Andrew SHIELDS

SHIELDS
Date of birth21 July 1876
PlaceHotham, Victoria, Australia
ParentsDr Andrew and Agnes (nee Weir) Shields
Date of death22 February 1952
PlaceOakley, England, United Kingdom
Age75
Scotch Year(s)1889 to 1892

Service record and post-war life

Though he lacked a surgical degree, Douglas Andrew Shields was an experienced surgeon at the outbreak of war and became surgeon in chief of the ‘Australian Voluntary Hospital’, a hospital that served alongside British forces in France from 1914 and 1916, approved by the British government and staffed entirely by Australian volunteer medical men. For a time Douglas was at the hospital in Wimereux in France. On returning from France to London he became surgeon in chief at the Hospital for Wounded Officers, previously the Harold Fink Private Hospital, which had been set up for him by a benefactor before the war.

He was said to have operated on over 2000 officers during the war. According to his biography in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Douglas was later appointed consultant surgeon to the Royal Navy as a rear admiral and posted to the Grand Fleet at Rosyth in Scotland. He was also promoted to brigadier-general in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. Douglas was knighted for his wartime services in 1919.

Douglas’ Hospital for Wounded Officers became his private hospital after the war. Although he was not accepted by the fraternity of London surgeons due to his lack of a senior surgical qualification, Douglas’ practice attracted the aristocracy, the rich, and the famous, including Russia’s grand duke Alexander, Dame Nellie Melba, and (Sir) Donald Bradman. He was considered a pioneer in the use of aeroplanes to see sick patients, with a wealthy American establishing a hospital in Cannes, France in 1929, at which Shields would treat vacationing American millionaires each week. In 1931 Douglas was elected a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. Douglas died at Oakley, Surrey, England, in 1952. He had married Mary Ellen Shirrefs (d. 1939) in 1899, and they had two sons and a daughter, of whom only the eldest son survived him.

Sources:

  1. Australian War Memorial – Honours and Awards
  2. Likeman, Colonel Robert, Australian Doctors on the Western Front, Rosenberg Publishing, Dural, 2014
  3. Mishura Scotch Database
  4. Murphy, Leonard J. T., 'Shields, Sir Douglas Andrew (1876–1952)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/shields-sir-douglas-andrew-8416/text14783, published first in hardcopy 1988, accessed online 15 October 2016.
  5. Obituary in British Medical Journal, 8 March 1952, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2022969/pdf/brmedj03484-0063f.pdf
  6. Scotch Collegian 1919

Page last updated: 11 November 2015