The Current - Canadian War Museum’s chief historian Tim Cook dies at 54

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Tim Cook was the chief historian and researcher at the Canadian War Museum, known for his passion for Canadian military history. He was recognized with many awards, including the Governor General's History Award and the Order of Canada. He died on Sunday at the age of 54. We hear Matt Galloway’s conversation with Tim Cook from 2022 about his book "Life Savers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and The Struggle for Survival in the Great War," where he he explored how Canadian doctors took part in a British program that harvested organs from dead First World War soldiers without consent.  

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Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Tim Cook was the chief historian and researcher at the Canadian War Museum. He was known for his passion for Canadian military history and recognized with many awards, including the Governor General's History Award and the Order of Canada. Tim Cook died on Sunday.

He was 54. He had been a guest on the current on several occasions. In 2022, Matt Galloway spoke with Tim Cook. about his book, Lifesavers and Body Snatchers, Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War. In it, he explored how Canadian doctors took part in a British program that harvested organs from dead First World War soldiers without consent. It was part of a program to help doctors learn about extreme injuries on the battlefield and the potential lessons for those trying to save lives. Here is Matt Galloway's conversation with Tim Cook. Why did you want to write this book and tell this story?

story of war? Well, Matt, I wrote this book during COVID. And so we were living through this terrible pandemic, this period of a great historical crisis. And I was reflecting back on other historical crises we had passed through. And I couldn't help but make connections to the Great War, an area of scholarship that I have written about. And the doctors and the nurses who served in that war, about 20,000 who served, about half of all Canadian doctors, a third of the nurses. And I wanted to understand what they had done in that terrible war over a hundred years ago. That war were Canadians fought overseas, where we achieved victories, bloody victories on the Somme and Vimy and Passchendale, but we paid such a terrible price. Sixty-six thousand

Canadians killed. And yet there would have been far more without the doctors and nurses. So that's what got me going forward. Although, as you mentioned, there was a medical mystery that had, I think, haunted me. I think that's not too strong a word. Haunted me for over a decade that I was trying to figure out and finally was able to determine in the National Archives this incredible story. So let's talk about that medical mystery. We'll get to the lifesavers in a moment. But the body snatchers, as referred to in the title of this book. Who were the body snatchers? The body snatchers, well, it was a nickname for stretcher bears,

and those were the brave Canadian soldiers who had put down their rifles and had picked up stretchers and would go out into no man's land to pick up the wounded, under fire, incredible stories of bravery and courage, caring for Canadians, but also the enemy, the Germans as well, banaging up those wounded soldiers who suffered horrendous wounds and helping them to medical care. But the body snatchers in the title of the book also refers to this medical mystery. And it refers to the Canadian doctors who were part of a British program of harvesting body parts. I'll just repeat that, harvesting body parts of slain soldiers.

And I had seen snippets of this in the last. letters and diaries of doctors, but I could scarcely believe it, Matt. I just, it's nowhere in any of our history books. It's not part of our story of how we treated the fallen. And yet, from 1915, there was a program, a medical program, to autopsy slain Canadian and British soldiers and to remove their damaged brains, their gassed lungs, their shattered femurs, and to send them to a museum in London and ultimately back to Canada. And that is the story that I uncover in this book, shocking insofar as almost 800 body parts

were removed from Canadian and British soldiers, eventually to be sent back to Canada, and never has this story been told before. This is grisly and kind of ghastly stuff. where did where did the program come from who was behind this program Matt it is it is ghastly

it is ghoulish and as I was researching it I just couldn't believe this was happening now of course we should remember that how doctors learned in the 18th 19th and early part of the 20th century was often through

the corpses of the slain they would open up the dead for the secrets to life. And yet this was happening to Canadian soldiers, soldiers who enlisted voluntarily, at least for most of the war, to serve king and country, to help liberate the French and the Belgians, to fight with the British, to fight against German militarism. These were not the normal corpses that were made available to doctors, often through grave robbing, at least in the 19th century. These were Canadian boys, the sacred fallen, as they were called. And so to come to your question, it was part of a British program to help the doctors learn. There was a constant evolution in learning.

And we can just think of the horrendous battlefield with the exploding shells and the shrapnel and the high-velocity small arms fire, the machine guns, the chemical weapons, the tanks, the wounds were horrendous. I have research soldiers, their letters and diaries, all of my adult life. And it's quite a graphic story I tell here. But to learn from the wounds, one of the ways was to have lectures behind the lines, but also to learn from these body parts. So it makes sense, I think, within this context of learning for the doctors in attempting to save lives. And yet, Matt, it does seem to me to have been a story that has been buried. And I think one, because it is so jarring to how we think of the Canadian soldiers and especially the fallen. You say you were haunted by this. Why were you haunted by the story?

I've been haunted by it because I didn't think it was true. There are a lot of rumors and half-truths about war, and we see that in the age we live in now and post-truth era. I just couldn't believe that this was happening. And I, you know, I've written 14 books, and I've spent a lot of time in the archives, and some of the listeners will know my books. I spent far too long there, and I looked for these files. And if it was part of an official program, it had to be there. And I spent years looking for these files. They were buried.

They were mislabeled. Eventually, I found them. And Matt, I have to tell you, it was shocking. Shocking to read of the orders from the British to the Canadians and then taken up fully by Canadian doctors to find good soldiers and good specimens. Doctors writing that they had a brain that had been ripped apart by shrapnel and that would it make a good specimen. and indeed it would, how they cut open the bodies and extracted these body parts, sent them to London. There's a fight over the body parts. The Canadians realize that they want these and want them sent back to Canada.

It's all documented there, including, and I should note here, the names of many of these soldiers. And to read about a private who was shot through the head. and died 11 days later in agony, but before he was buried, his brain was extracted. It affected me. And, you know, I've been doing this for 25 years. I am more calloused and hardened to some of the horror of war than many others. I realized that. But this did affect me, and it did haunt me.

This was done without the consent of the families of these soldiers, right? You're right, Matt. there was no consent, although, of course, as a historian, I try to place myself in the context of the times. It's, you know, we know how the war ended. We know it ended on November 11, 1918, on the Western Front. Those Canadians did not know. And I sometimes thought as I was researching and writing this book in 2020, you know, how would COVID-19 end? I wonder. What would be the legacies? How would we talk about this great historical event that we, We were living through, as I was researching, another great and traumatic historical event. And I was reminded again of the context of the time.

And so there was no consent, although that was not really anything that anyone considered. And in fact, when you enlisted in the First World War, in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, your body was basically owned by the military. This is the war we shot and executed 25 Canadians by firing squad. So we're talking extreme discipline here in the military context. And yet, and yet their next of kin were not told that their body parts had been harvested. There are personnel files at the Library Archives of Canada. That's our National Archives in Ottawa. For each Canadian soldier, I went through dozens of them.

Those soldiers I knew who had a body part extracted from other files. There was no mention on their personnel files. So nobody knew about this, except for these secret files that I eventually found. And so even as I try to understand the context here, as we've talked about, Matt, the process of learning, the secrets of the dead, that I can understand that, except, of course, that these were Canadian soldiers serving king and country. These were Canadian boys and husbands and fathers and uncles. These were soldiers who were told they were on a great crusade. And especially after the war, when we were dealing with the 66,000 dead, when we were creating memorials across this country,

the very powerful poem read at the top in Flanders fields, we were building memorials at Vimy and across this country. And yet we were extracting the body parts and they were studying the body parts. Those, to me, that is what haunted me. They didn't make sense. You used the phrase grave robbing earlier. And in the book you say that this wasn't grave robbing, but an act of forcing dead soldiers to once again serve their country, that this was an eternal demand by the state. How were these body parts used?

I mean, part of this is about propaganda, right? It is. The fallen during the war were used. They were weaponized to help demand greater exertions from Canadians to continue to give money or to serve. Even in death, these Canadian soldiers were not done. They were expected to continue to serve. They were expected to provide lessons. And that is one of the things in the book is that I draw out the tremendous. learning and lessons that emerge from this war. It is a revolution in medical treatment. And yet, as one doctor said during the war, at what a cost, at what a cost we have learned to better serve Canadians. And indeed, I think that's one way to think about these harvested soldiers' body parts. This assent isn't for everyone.

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that this is someone's son. And there is great empathy in the letters of the nurses and the doctors to the mangled soldiers who were brought in and who they tried to save and who they often did save, but for others who died. And I was often brought to tears about reading about nurses who were holding the hands of boys in their final hours as they whispered for their mothers. I couldn't help but think of the COVID-19 patients in isolation, not being able to be seen by their families and nurses and doctors bearing witness to their last moments. And yet I didn't find that. I didn't find any objection to this harvesting of body parts.

And so I guess we do have to understand it in that context of the time. But what's really interesting, I think, about the body parts is when they returned to Canada after the war, 799 body parts, they're to be put into a medical museum that will be built in Ottawa. Spoiler here, it was never built. And you can see the government of the day, Sir Robert, Borden's unionist government devoted $10,000 to the body part, so they would be cataloged. Today's would be about $150,000. It's an order in counsel.

I mean, this wasn't a secret. And yet, by 1922, as Canada is struggling to make meaning of the fallen, as we're building these memorials, you can see in the records that the Department of National Defense, or what will become that in 1924, they realize that there's something very wrong here, that they should not have these body parts, that it does not align with how Canadians are thinking about the sacred nature of the fallen. And they just walk back from this, and they ensure that the body parts are not destroyed, at least initially. They go to McGill University in Montreal, where they will become teaching specimens there for the next three decades. How do you sit with something like this as a historian, given the fact that you initially

were questioning whether the story was real, then you do the investigation into it. Where does it leave you? This was a tough story to understand. I'll be honest, my initial reaction was outrage. My initial reaction, once I had established it was a real story, was disbelief, how this could happen. And even when I was situating it within the historical times and what doctors and medical practitioners were trying to do with them, I was not willing to simply brush it off and to simply say, okay, I get it now. It's part of the learning process. And so I have struggled with this. And in the book, there is a tension, a tension between trying to present in a fair way. I try, I hope, what the medical practitioners were doing

but then I think my horror the fact that these 799 body parts are back in Canada that we as Canadians were told that our Canadian soldiers who died overseas that they were buried in the Commonwealth War Graves commissioned cemeteries or those who lost their bodies

are named on the Vimeon Memorial or the Meningate and yet we know that in hundreds of cases These Canadians were not buried with their full body parts, that they were expected to serve beyond death. You've mentioned a couple of times, and part of this is about when you were writing the book, writing it during the pandemic, but also some ties that you found to the pandemic. One of them that's interesting is around the issue of vaccination, the vaccination of soldiers during the war. You write in the book that men who faced every form of death from bullet or shell quailed before a simple inoculation. Why was vaccination controversial during the war? Well, most armies in human history have died through disease.

They have been decimated by virus and bacteria. And the doctors who were in uniform understood that. And there was a great fear that the armies on the Western Front, of course, living in these cesspools of open ditches with rats and lice and unburied corpses, that they would be ravaged by disease. And so from the very start of the war, Canadian doctors impressed upon the high command that all of the Canadian soldiers had to be vaccinated. And that's an interesting story. Of course, we were living through and continue to live through these vaccination debates. It is very clear that vaccination saved Canadian soldiers' lives.

The British, for instance, didn't have mandatory vaccination at the start of the war, and they suffered far more losses to disease. And this is just one of those stories that seemed to resonate with me. about this historical event a hundred years ago and continued to influence how I was thinking about the history. As a historian, you're trying to write in the times. You're trying not to let hindsight and what you know influence you. And yet I couldn't help but see these parallels.

And I would run downstairs to my wife or kids and tell them about my findings and then try to make sense of them. But those vaccinations are fascinating. because throughout the war, Canadian soldiers were vaccinated in the trenches. They were not allowed to say no, even though some tried to. And there were those in Canada who were against vaccination. And one of the lessons and legacies of the Great War medical war was that doctors came back and said, we have to do a better job with public health.

We have to instigate vaccinations. And there's a great debate in the 1920s. We established the Department of Health in 1919, just one of the many lessons that emerges from the killing fields of the Western Front. I mean, in timely, in part because there's the issue of the Spanish flu, which is the pandemic that hits the world just in the final months of this war. Tell me about that. Yes, on top of this horrific war that would kill 9.4 million soldiers and millions of civilians, the Spanish flu was unleashed in the summer. of 1918 and it initially was quite benign but then it mutated as we know with the virus we are currently living with and this H1N1 virus became a great killing virus 55,000 Canadians died from the

flu 50 million worldwide again just another one of these parallels and in fact when I started the book in early 2020 it was to think about why we hadn't learned the lessons from the 1918 and 1919 flu and why hadn't we built a memorial to the fallen there are thousands memorials to the great war dead but we have almost no memorials to the virus dead and it was just one of those connections i began to think about the the flu itself had a tremendous impact on the war the german army suffered horribly from the virus and as a I was looking at the history with new eyes, having lived and living through the pandemic, I began to see other connections that I hadn't made in the past, the importance of preventative

medicine, the virus in affecting the nature of fighting in the last months of the war, and other legacies as well. And I think that's one of the things that fascinates me as a historian to continue to come back to our shared history, to look at it with new evidence. or with new eyes, and perhaps to draw lessons for Canadians in the present, or perhaps to reflect upon our shared path forward into the future. Well, in those medical professionals, I mean, we talked a lot about the body snatchers, obviously, but the lifesavers did extraordinary work. You say in the book that, what, nine out of ten wounded soldiers survive their injury

if they were treated by a medic? They were. Why don't we know more about that, given what we know about the carnage of this war? That so many wounded soldiers, if they were seen, the overwhelming number, if they were seen by a medic survive those injuries. They did survive in that. And I think the carnage is really difficult for us not to be lost in the carnage because it is so awful. And I don't want to downplay what the soldiers passed through the incredible bombardments

that shattered bodies and mines and poison gas. And yet, as you say, if they were able to make it to a doctor or a surgeon, they were likely to survive. In those statistics, though, are the thousands of Canadians who died in no man's land, who died in being carried back to a surgical table. And however, I do think that that's a part of the war that we have downplayed, the incredible care from the doctors and nurses, the emotional struggle that they went through,

the incredible evolution in surgical care and in preventative medicine, Listen, I don't want the body snatcher's part to overwhelm the lifesavers part. And yet there is a tension there. There are contradictions inherent in war. And there are no easy answers. And I hope that this book offers perhaps some more nuance and insight into that terrible war that so forever changed our country. And I guess just finally, things still to learn about a war that, as you say, changed the country. there are always things to learn

this is my 14th major book and I'm always finding something new in the archives in stories that we tell and Matt you and I have talked about this before but as I have said if we don't tell our story no one else will

it's up to us this is a Canadian story these are about Canadian soldiers and doctors and nurses there were Canadian innovations in this war and I think it's part of our shared past. And it helps us, I think, to move

forward into a shared future. It's good to speak with you again. Tim, thank you very much. Thanks, Matt Galloway. In conversation with Canadian military historian Tim Cook in 2022, Tim Cook died on Sunday at the age of 54. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on

CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at CBC. cbc.ca slash the current or on the cbc listen app or wherever you get your podcasts my name is matt galloway thanks for listening for more cbc podcasts go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts