Back to Book Reviews Back to Cercles Aristocrats, Adventurers and Ambulances British Medical Units in the Spanish Civil War Linda Palfreeman The Canada Blanch/Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2014 Paperback. xx + 249 p. ISBN 9781845196103. £25.00 Reviewed by Jonathan Sebastian Browne University of Kent (Canterbury) Aristocrats, Adventurers and Ambulances : British Medical Units in the Spanish Civil War is a welcome new addition to the growing, but still extremely limited corpus of work that takes as its focus what can be broadly described as a historyofmedicine approach to the Spanish Civil War. This limited engagement with the history of medicine in relation to the conflict is surprising, as the international efforts to aid the beleaguered Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939 has engendered thousands of books on the subject.(1) Only a handful of these books, however, deal directly with medical aid, despite the need for the provision of medical and humanitarian assistance being one of the main focuses of the many campaigns internationally for offering succour to the loyalist cause, and which therefore inform the wider historiography. (2) Thus Aristocrats, Adventurers and Ambulances : British Medical Units in the Spanish Civil War, alongside Linda Palfreeman’s previous monograph ¡Salud! British Volunteers in the Republican Medical Service during the Spanish Civil War, 19361939, first published in 2012, are important contributions to this slowly growing corpus of work. (3) Linda Palfreeman’s latest book looks at the role played by the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) created by the Glaswegian philanthropist Sir Daniel Macaulay Stevenson and which was led by Fernanda Jacobson, and Sir George Young’s University Ambulance Unit (GYAU) founded and led by the British aristocrat Sir George Young, during the Spanish Civil War. Part One of the book examines the evolution of, and the work carried out by the SAU, predominantly in and around Madrid, with part two dedicated to the formation of the GYAU and its role in providing humanitarian aid close to the Southern Front during the conflict. Palfreeman in her Prologue emphasises that her study of these two organisations is ‘specific in focus’ and is centred on the important role they played in ‘providing medical and humanitarian aid to the Spanish Republic’ [xix]. It is also in the Prologue that she highlights why this story has received such scant attention, namely, the ‘paucity of detailed records on the structure and functioning of the units in question and their service in the field’. She goes on to explain how new evidence, namely in the form of Sir George Young’s personal correspondence, and a re evaluation of the existing documentary evidence on the SAU (parts of which are relatively unexplored), has allowed her to shed new light on these events [xx]. Part One ‘¡Salud! Scotland’ offers a chronology of events from early fundraising efforts centred on Glasgow, ‘the hub of Scottish aid for Spain’ [13], through the organisation and setting up of the SAU, to the first unit’s leaving Scotland on 17 September 1936, its arrival in