This history of the U. S. Army Medical Department deals with the period when the Medical Department existed only as a wartime expedient and concludes with the passage in April 1818 of the law that finally established the department on a permanent basis. The discipline that government Army surgeons and their patients enabled them to control treatment and record its results with a precision and regularity impossible in civilian medicine. Thus Army surgeons and the Medical Department played a large role in the progress of medical science, a role not always recognized by the profession, by the...

Mary Gillet authors a long-needed in-depth analysis of the departments struggle to maintain the health and fighting ability of the nations soldiers during both World War I-a conflict of unexpected proportions and violence-and the years that preceded World War II. In 1917, unprepared as a result of the widespread conviction that to prepare for war is to encourage its outbreak, the Medical Department faced confusion exacerbated by a shortage of both equipment and trained personnel. While bringing to bear knowledge of disease and disease prevention gained in the years after the Spanish-American...