Post 1902 Officers Indian Medical Service (IMS) cap badge.

High quality silver and gilt officers cap badge with rear blade fixings.

What the IMS did. The IMS was the senior military medical service of British India, formally unified from the separate Bengal, Madras, and Bombay Presidency medical services in the 1890s, though its roots trace back to East India Company ship’s surgeons in the 1600s. Its officers, both British and Indian, provided medical care to Indian Army troops, British officers, and colonial officials, and staffed military and civil hospitals across India. Notable IMS officers included the Nobel laureate Sir Ronald Ross and Henry Vandyke Carter, the anatomist behind the original Gray’s Anatomy illustrations.

Theatres of war.

• First World War: IMS officers served alongside Indian Army units across nearly every major theatre. This included the Western Front in France and Belgium (Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, the Somme), Gallipoli, East Africa, and above all Mesopotamia, where the largest single Indian expeditionary force (IEF “D”) was deployed and where medical support became a subject of official scrutiny after heavy losses to disease and poor evacuation arrangements. IMS personnel also served in Egypt and Palestine.

• Second World War: IMS officers again served widely, including in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa (some were captured at Tobruk in 1942), and extensively in the Burma campaign and the wider China-Burma-India theatre, supporting Fourteenth Army and other Indian formations through the Arakan, Imphal, and the advance into Burma in 1944-45.