Dear Reader,
While the official release date for Battalion Surgeon is May 28, as a friend of Mayo Clinic Press, you can order your copy today and receive a special discount.
“And there I was, in battle . . . the eerie half-light of dawn—the mass of milling soldiers, the sharp crack of enemy shells, the stinging odor of cordite on my eyes and nose, the many burned-out tanks strewn along the road and in the fields, and the dead German and American soldiers in great numbers.”
Far from his days at Harvard Medical School and his family and patients in Philadelphia, Dr. William McConahey was thrust into the hellfire of World War II. At risk to his own life, he cared for friends and foes, combatants and civilians. After all, he wrote: “I am a doctor.”
Battalion Surgeon is his first-person account as a physician in combat with the 90th Infantry Division. It covers landing on the beach of Normandy, France, just two days after D-Day, fighting across occupied Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, liberating the Flossenbürg concentration camp and the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Written in the summer of 1945, soon after the war ended, Battalion Surgeon conveys the immediacy of “mud and discomfort and suffering and death and terror and destruction.” Through it all—and in his distinguished postwar career at Mayo Clinic—Dr. McConahey served the suffering with compassion and care.
Order today and receive a special discount! | 
