The BBC documentary: Wounded

A few were there for other reasons. Two such were medics, a surgeon and an anaesthetist. They were from a large, busy A&E department in a hospital in Vienna.

South Africa had excellent medical facilities and, unlike Europe, allowed experiments on chimpanzees. Many were imported for the purpose from the war-ravaged Congo or Rwanda.

This was why these two men were there. Their time was spent inflicting massive wounds on chimpanzees under sedation, seeking to recreate the road crash injuries they saw inflicted on humans in Vienna. They then revived the chimpanzees, observed them, took samples, and carried out further operations and procedures. At the end of this Mengele-like experiment, they "humanely" killed their "patients".

The surgeon was deeply troubled. On his last evening, he spoke of how one of the chimps, about to die through his actions, looking him in the eye, holding out his human-like hand to him for comfort. The anaesthetist, apparently indifferent to their suffering and fate, spoke of the value of these experiments to the humans coming through the doors of his hospital department.

Chimpanzees, too, are capable of deliberate violence. Males can and sometimes do commit horrifically murderous acts upon each other. Some even wage tribal wars. They devise strategies, lose and win battles, undertake subterfuge and ambush.

But we human primates wage a more calculated, sustained, nuanced violence. We organise it, justify it, whether against individuals, on our roads, or at war.

The MoD put their Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Selly Oak because the city gets its share of traumatically injured people, plus we have first-rate hospitals and a fine Medical School. Many medics here already had experience in mending the maimed, and are gaining unrivaled expertise now. We are, rightly, in awe of their skill and their humanity.

We're rarely reminded of the cause of it all. When we are . . . for me, it was well-nigh impossible to watch; the BBC documentary Wounded showed the shock of war on the lives of two youngsters, barely men, their bodies mutilated in Afghanistan.

Do you, like me, feel an impotent shame at the chilling, wilful aforethought of our violence, whether warfare in Kandahar and Helmand, or the tale I heard all those years ago in Pretoria?

© Kate Cooper