Eden Rea-Hedrick brings artist and prisoner of war Charles Thrale into the realm of queer medical humanities by asking what his wartime work can reveal about midcentury concerns around gender and disability.
Over three intellectually stimulating days in late March, twenty PhD students from around the world came together at Durham University to wrestle with the notion of queer methodologies in the medical humanities. Under the guidance of faculty across a wide array of disciplines, we read, discussed, crafted, drew, and laughed together as we contemplated what queer methodologies might look like for our various investments in the medical humanities. Using these conversations to enrich my own work, I pose the following question: What can we discover about midcentury concerns regarding gender and disability through the visual art of Charles, Thrale, an able-bodied straight male prisoner of war? I argue that this question belongs to the realm of queer medical humanities.
Benjamin Dalton and Chase Ledin (2024) describe queer medical humanities as a field of inquiry that “interrogates the evolution and operation of (hetero)normative structures such as gender and sexuality and the constraints and oppressions associated with medical and wider social structures.” While Thrale’s work bears no surface relation to questions of queerness, a methodological approach that reads Thrale’s art through the lens of the queer history of World War II sheds new light on how Thrale’s work both expresses and alleviates midcentury anxieties about masculinity and disability.
Gender Division in Thrale’s Postwar Exhibition
From 1946 to 1964, British draftsman and portrait artist turned soldier Charles Thrale toured England with his art exhibition The Valleys of the Shadow of Death. The exhibition consisted of a series of drawings Thrale made during his three years as a prisoner of war in the Far East during the Second World War. His art attempted to capture the horror of the POW experience as the exhibition raised money for veterans’ charities (Oliver 2014). Thrale’s portraits of soldiers and fellow POWs are typically monochromatic, reflecting both the bleakness of his subject matter and his limited access to materials—at times he resorted to using his own blood and hair for pigment and bristles (Oliver 2014, 239). They also emphasize the fragility of the male body. A portrait titled The Aussie Who Did Not Want To Die centers a naked, emaciated male form on a minimal brown background, while The Burning of the Cholera Dead depicts a series of weak grayish figures standing or slumping around a pyre. It is difficult to distinguish the living workers from the corpses.
Thrale’s frail, listless male figures make a sharp contrast with his images of women. In a watercolor portrait titled Doreen Thrale, for instance, he depicts his daughter (whom he had not yet met) as a cherubic, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked infant with thick brown curls and a full, plump face. A pen and ink drawing labeled Somebody’s Wife features a similarly vibrant female figure with full smiling cheeks and gleaming healthy teeth.
A cheerful blond Pin Up Girl posing on the beach seems to belong to a different world from the gaunt, recumbent male forms of “F” Force Survivors from the “Death Railway.” Thrale seems to have reserved colored art supplies, when available, for these vivid portraits of women; his men are relegated to black, brown, and gray.
Among these men are a cluster of downcast amputees titled The Disabled Limbless Listening to Lectures Organised to Help them Forget. The mostly colorless drawing—black ink shading a beige square of paper—offers no individual distinction to its human forms. The men are shown in silhouette, mostly from the back. The clearest distinguishing features are the crutches and sticks they lean on or sit beside in the absence of various limbs.
The connection between war and disability seems straightforward enough: war disables on a vast scale, and societies grappling with war and its aftermath must confront disability in new ways. While the First World War had already brought disability to public attention far more widely than in previous centuries – especially in Britain – medical advances between the wars meant that soldiers wounded in World War II were far more likely to survive with residual disabilities than had previously been possible (Anderson 2011, 72). As a result, (some kinds of) disability were transformed in the public imagination from a source of private shame for individual families (Cohen 2013) to a widespread tragedy and a public threat.
We see this threat articulated in the stark gender division of Thrale’s work. His women radiate health and wholeness, clearly fitter and more capable than his corpse-like men. This contrast highlights a deep-seated popular fear prompted by disability: the supposed erosion of masculinity through incapacity. Historian E. Anthony Rotundo (1993, 6) contends that since the late nineteenth century, physical “strength, appearance, and athletic skill” have come to be understood as a “vital component of manhood.” The privations and dangers of war threatened men’s bodily integrity and with it their sense of male self-assurance. As historian Daniel Sherman (1996, 85) puts it, “Many veterans, especially those literally mutilated by the war, experienced their loss as a kind of emasculation.” Paradoxically, risking this kind of emasculation was necessary in order to prove one’s masculinity. As Kathy J. Phillips (2006, 85) argues, many men volunteered to fight in the Second World War “seeking the elusive stamp of manhood” it would grant them in a society that defined men as defenders. Men went to war to prove their manhood even as they risked losing it altogether in the process.
Proving Manhood Medically
This process began before men even reached the battlefield. Both the American and British militaries employed rigorous screening processes for draftees to determine their fitness for service, subjecting millions of men to minute physical scrutiny and measurement. Christina Jarvis (2004, 56) describes the process in vivid detail: “From his feet to his ears, [the draftee] was poked, pricked, prodded, and measured. His height, weight, chest size, and other physical statistics were recorded, and blood and urine samples were taken for tests. He encountered ophthalmoscopes, stethoscopes, chest x-ray machines, and other diagnostic aids, which allowed doctors to penetrate beneath his skin.”
These procedures implied that any man could be caught out in some hidden defect that would make him unfit for service. The disability visibility created by the war took shape not just through the bodies that returned disabled, but through those of the “more than five million young men [who] had been found physically, mentally, or emotionally unfit for service” (Jennings 2016, 8) (This number includes only U.S. exclusions; adding Britain makes it much higher [Broad 2006,184-5]). In a cultural moment when a “fitness craze” (Anderson 2011, 31) had come to weigh heavily on popular notions of gender, being found insufficiently fit for service threatened even greater emasculation than returning from war physically disabled.
Over the course of the war, these screenings expanded to incorporate psychiatric evaluation, which included a deliberate attempt to ferret out and disqualify homosexuals as unfit on the basis of classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. Allan Bérubé (1990) details how US psychiatrists prevailed upon the military to incorporate psychiatric screenings into draftee evaluations, a move historian Regina Kunzel (2024, 12-13) identifies as part of psychiatrists’ project to make themselves “useful to the state, enhancing their own influence and expanding their power in the process.”
While the integration of psychiatrists and psychologists into British military screening procedures proved contentious and staff shortages meant that only about half of British military conscripts were actually subjected to psychological screenings in contrast to their more widespread use in the United States, both British and American would-be soldiers were rejected on homosexual grounds (Broad 2006, 157-9). A 1941 Selective Services circular for the US army named “homosexual proclivities” among the “disqualifying ‘deviations’” (Bérubé 1990, 12) for recruits, while British soldiers who made it past screening found wartime homosexual liaisons “rigorously punished,” with more than 500 men discharged for “‘gross depravity’” over the course of the war (Broad 2006, 208). David Serlin (2004, 38-9) contends that the postwar emphasis by medical professionals “on rehabilitating the amputee’s masculinity along with his body” stands as “an artifact left over from the military’s deep-seated and overt homophobia.”
Sexuality and Stigma: The Right Kind of Disabled
Thrale’s men may be diffident and frail, their physical prowess sacrificed to harrowing experiences on the battlefield and in captivity. Yet alongside the vibrant women they risked this state to defend, their very presence at the scene of the war, physically disabled or not, bears witness to the intactness of their masculinity and the veracity of their heterosexuality. The “disabled limbless” of Thrale’s portrait may be trying to “forget” the tragedy of their disability, but at the same time, they remind the viewer that they have already successfully surmounted an even more insidious threat to their masculinity.
Under widespread state scrutiny that required many more men than ever before to directly confront the idea of homosexuality as disability (Kunzel 2024, 92), the men who made it through to war were those determined (officially at least) to reject that stigma. There are no (open) homosexuals among Thrale’s subjects, because Thrale’s men are – according to the logic of midcentury gender structures – the right kind of disabled. This sideways look at Thrale’s art informed by a queer medical humanities methodology allows his work to not only reveal his own experiences, but also offer insight into larger cultural anxieties and norms regarding disability and sexuality.
About the author
Eden Rea-Hedrick (they/them) is a fifth-year PhD candidate in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Their dissertation engages the intersection of critical disability studies and midcentury queer fiction. Eden’s work at the PhD school was supported by a research award from the Yale LGBT Studies Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS).
About the 2025 Medical Humanities PhD School
This post is part of a collection of contributions from attendees of the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School which took place in Durham in March 2025. The PhD school was funded by Wellcome, as part of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, and the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMHB) at Linköping University.
All articles in this collection can be found on this page: 2025 Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School.
References
Anderson, Julie. 2011. War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation.’ Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Bérubé, Allan. 1990. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Macmillan.
Broad, Roger. 2006. Conscription in Britain 1939-1964: The Militarisation of a Generation. New York: Routledge.
Cohen, Deborah. 2013. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dalton, Benjamin and Chase Ledin. 2024. “What are the Queer Medical Humanities?” The Polyphony.
Jarvis, Christina S. 2004. The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Jennings, Audra. 2016. Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kunzel, Regina. 2024. In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Oliver, Lizzie. 2014. “‘What our Sons went through’: The Connective Memories of Far Eastern Captivity in the Charles Thrale Exhibition, 1946-1964.” Journal of War & Culture Studies 7(3): 236-252.
Phillips, Kathy J. 2006. Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rotundo, E. Anthony. 1993. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books.
Serlin, David. 2004. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sherman, Daniel J. 1996 “Monuments, Mourning, and Masculinity in France After World War I.” Gender & History 8(1): 83-107.
Thrale, Charles. 1943. The Aussie Who Did Not Want to Die. Pencil on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. ca. 1943. The Burning of the Cholera Dead. Ink on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. 1944. Doreen Thrale. Watercolor on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. ca. 1943 The Disabled Limbless Listening to Lectures Organised to Help Them Forget. Ink on paper, Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. 1943. “F” Force Survivors from the “Death Railway.” Brass polish and medicine sediment on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. 1944. Pin Up Girl. Watercolor on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
—. 1944. Somebody’s Wife. Ink and pencil on paper. Imperial War Museum Art Collection.
