Military medicine

“ The transportation and hospitalization of the battle casualties and respiratory diseases have been accomplished in accordance with the principles of military surgery and preventative medicine, which reflects the intelligence and training on the part of the officers, nurses, and enlisted men of the Medical Department of the 92nd Division, in which pride may be justly felt. ”

“ One can be sure that the record of the past will serve as an inspiration to those individuals responsible in the future for the destiny of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and its important role in advancing military medicine. ”

“ An even broader concept of the place of the Institute of Pathology in the general scheme of military medicine after passage of the National Security Act of 1947 resulted from the appointment and deliberations of the Committee on Medical and Hospital Services of the Armed Forces. ”

“ Such knowledge of medicine and surgery as is possessed by the medical profession generally will not alone suffice to make an efficient military surgeon. He must have, in addition, knowledge of the administration and sanitation of large field hospitals and camps, in order to safeguard the health and lives of men intrusted in great numbers to his care. ”

“ Washington, an Army Medical Museum," the circular read, "Medical officers are directed diligently to collect, and to forward to the office of the Surgeon General, all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable; together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the study of military medicine or surgery. These objects should be accompanied by short explanatory notes.
Figure 2.—Surgeon General Hammond announces his intention to establish the Army Medical Museum, 21 May 1862. ”

“ The medical service provides treatment and preventive medicine for military personnel and, in certain circumstances, for dependents and for persons employed by the military. Its services are also available to the public at large during individual emergencies, if they are the most immediately available, and on a larger scale during epidemics or natural disasters. Military personnel may also avail themselves of emergency facilities in nonmilitary hospitals or clinics. ”

“ The outbreak of the war found the medical profession with no such common body of principles and measures as those which enabled Medicine and Surgery to deal so successfully with the more material effects of warfare upon the human organism. ”

“ The comparative richness of the results of Army medical research was attributed, in part, to the fact that "the civilian profession, while frequently establishing the principles used as a basis for disease control, lack the opportunity to prove their worth which are offered the military by reason of the latter's contract with bodies of troops under discipline." ”

“ War takes medical science into the field, where the control of large masses of men enables it to develop the highest efficiency.
Even in normal peace conditions biological and pathological science has been accomplishing results not popularly understood. Individual cures by surgery and medicine appeal to personal interests, but these are negligible compared to the prevention of plagues like smallpox, typhus and tuberculosis. ”

“ In its aims and purposes, the Institute represents the hard core of our attack on disease and war injuries which ordinarily take such a terrific toll of military effectiveness * * *. In these days of increasingly devastating conflicts, this institution will become of even greater importance than during the past. New types of warfare, including atomic weapons, make additional pathological facilities mandatory for the prevention and treatment of casualties. ”

“ The striking success in coping with the infectious diseases, which in all other recent wars have been far more deadly than the weapons of the enemy, shows that modern medicine war prepared for this aspect of the war, and had ready for use the main lines of treatment which would take the sting from these scourges of warfare. ”

“ The treatment of every case of sickness must be determined ultimately for and by itself, tentatively by skilled men, and as their practical sagacity may determine, while they bear in mind that the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them. ”

“ The achievements in the field of discovery of the chemist, the physicist and the biologist have given the military surgeon an advantage in diagnosis and treatment which was denied to his predecessors, and we are able to measure the effects of these advantages when we come to appraise the results which have been attained. ”

“ When treating officers or men suffering from war-neurosis, we have not only to think of the restoration of the patient to health, we have also to consider the question of fitness for military service. It is necessary to consider briefly the relation of the prescription of repression to this aspect of military medical practice. ”

“ Major Callender also pointed out that the Medical Department of the Army was in far better position to conduct a medical museum than was any other government service or an independent organization. "This is true," he said, "for preventive medicine and hygiene, as well as for pathology. Army officers have, since the advent of modern means of disease control, led the field in preventive medicine and hygiene. ”

“ I have had the privilege of being a physician for early forty years. Half of that time was spent on active duty in the military services and the other half was spent in the civilian sector. I have participated in the delivery of health care in every conceivable setting: in a battlefield tent in Korea ”

“ This department of an army, next to the commissariat, is the most important of all the non-combatant sections. The surgical treatment of the wounded in actual fighting, and still more the combat with disease engendered by crowding, unhealthy stations, and the reckless habits of the soldiery, necessitate a large medical staff; for, on an average of the whole army, it is found that the rate of sickness is at least quadruple that for the civil population. In the British army every battalion, when at home or in the temperate zone, has a surgeon and an assistant-surgeon ”

“ Preventable Diseases.—Men should be given a certain amount of theoretical knowledge of preventable diseases. These matters will be taken care of to a large extent by the Medical Corps; but men should be taught just what precautions are necessary to avoid recourse to the hospital. ”

“ Many other factors, such as the physical and mental condition of the men, the facilities for affording first aid, and the transport arrangements, also play a part in determining the nature and condition of the wounds that have to be dealt with by military surgeons. ”

“ Nevertheless, and despite the handicap of limited space and facilities, the Museum was, as The Surgeon General described it in his 1920 report, a very valuable connecting link between the Medical Department of the United States Army and the general medical profession of the United States, from the stand-point of scientific medicine and surgery. ”

“ Institute set up an extensive service, making study sets available to all Army laboratories, to keep medical officers throughout the Army informed about the pathology of the diseases prevalent during the war. ”

“ What brings these men through these trials and dangers is not only their American intestinal fortitude, all of them are armed with knowledge. Somewhere, aboard ship, in naval training stations, or in "boot" camps, doctors wearing the Navy's blue and the gold oak leaves and silver acorns which are the insignia of the Navy Medical Corps have taught these men how to protect themselves, if possible, from infection and disease. ”

“ Unless ample provision is now made by Congress to put the Medical Corps where it should be put disaster in the next war is inevitable, and the responsibility will not lie with those then in charge of the War Department, but with those who now decline to make the necessary provision. A well organized medical corps, thoroughly trained before the advent of war in all the important administrative duties of a military sanitary corps, is essential to the efficiency of any large army, and especially of a large volunteer army. ”

“ For the first time also in any campaign the labours of the surgeon and the physician have had the aid of the bacteriologist, the pathologist, the physiologist and indeed of every form of scientific assistance in the solution of their respective problems. The clinician entered upon the great war armed with all the resources which the advances of fifty years had made available. If the surgical problems of modern war can be said not to differ sensibly from the campaigns of the past, the form in which they have been presented is certainly as different as are the methods of their solution. ”

“ Very often they are, of course, unable to properly diagnose the ailments or conditions of their patients. They, however, are shrewd enough to follow out the customary army method of treating patients and regardless of the disease promptly administer vile doses of medicine, usually a physic, knowing full well that to the average patient, the stronger the medicine and the more of it he gets, the better the treatment is, and a large percentage of the recoveries effected by these felchers is more or less a matter of faith rather than physic or medicine. ”

“ In the Middle Ages there was no medical organization with armies, nor were there even any surgeons. The sick and wounded were left to shift for themselves, and were tended, if at all, by private persons out of charity, or in monasteries, for the monks alone possessed any knowledge of surgery and medicine in those days. ”

“ The importance of doing everything possible to look after one's health is shown by the fact that in every war so far, many more men have died from disease than were killed in battle or died from wounds. ”

“ For a successful battle against war-pestilences, it is a fortunate coincidence that the civil as well as the military authorities are equally interested in their prevention. Every military leader knows how important it is for the soldiers to keep healthy, since their efficiency is otherwise seriously impaired. It is not our task to describe the particular measures that are to be adopted; the manuals of military sanitation give us accurate information regarding these matters. ”

“ The military doctors account for the prevalence of diseases of the heart in the French army as arising from the fatiguing duties imposed on recruits, at an age when, generally, the development of the body is not in harmony with that of the heart, but either in advance of it or behind it. ”

“ The profession of medicine, and surgery, must always rank as the most noble that men can adopt. The spectacle of a doctor in action among soldiers, in equal danger and with equal courage, saving life where all others are taking it, allaying pain where all others are causing it, is one which must always seem glorious, whether to God or man. ”

“ The DoD shall provide ongoing training and health risk communication on the requirements of using an investigational drug in support of a military operation to all military personnel, including those in leadership positions, during chemical and biological warfare defense training and other training, as appropriate. ”

“ Each monograph covers one of the many questions at present of surpassing interest to the medical world, is written by a specialist who has himself been in close touch with the progress which he records in the medicine and surgery of the war. Each volume of the series is complete in itself, while the whole will form a comprehensive picture of the medicine and surgery of the Great War. ”

“ The army doctors are henceforth to go through the ordinary medical and surgical education first, and then to have an additional training to fit them to manage the diseases which most afflict armies, and the hurts which are received in battle. ”

“ The physique of our men has always excited the admiration of the British and Indian officers who have watched them disembark, and if an excess of high spirits in the troops has occasionally given an opportunity for military criticism, from a medical point of view this sign of robust health is altogether satisfactory. ”

“ Regarding war as a hard fact, as a doctor called in to a sick patient views disease, our concern here is simply with the course of the malady, our object being to gauge its future tendencies, in order, if possible, to limit its ravages and by scientific treatment ensure the speedy and complete recovery of the patient. ”

“ Inestimable facts of treatment are learned by watching, at the same time and in the same place, a ward full of patients ill of the same disease. People of all countries know this by the special learning which their physicians obtain in large civil hospitals: and the same thing happens in military hospitals, with the additional advantage that the information and improved art tend to the special safety of the future soldiery, in whatever climate they may be called on to serve.
There has long been some general notion of the duty of army-surgeons to record what they saw in foreign campaigns ”