Army Medicine 1775-1943

"He who would become a surgeon should join the army and follow it," said Hippocrates. In Victories of Army Medicine (Lippincott; $3), published last week, Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume shows that surgery has been only one great branch of U.S. Army healing. His book is the first general history of U.S. Army Medicine.

Catalogue of Credit. The colonel's pride in his branch of the service is huge and unabashed. His catalogue of credits to Army doctors may seem to leave little for other medical men:

> Walter Reed's work on yellow fever is well known. He also headed a board which investigated the cause of typhoid fever's spread among Spanish-American war troops. In that war 86.24% of the deaths were from typhoid; if the same disease rate had prevailed in World War I, half a million men would have had typhoid. Camp pollution, more than drinking water, was to blame. Camp sanitation was reformed and, more important, the Army tried out a vaccine developed in Britain (see cut, p. 75) and made vaccination compulsory. Only 1,572 World War I soldiers had typhoid.

>Army doctors discovered the organism of pneumonia (George Miller Sternberg, almost simultaneously with Pasteur in 1881), of tooth decay (Puerto Rican Major Fernando Emilio Rodriguez, 1921), trench fever, three types of dysentery.

> Army doctors developed vaccines, extracts or serums against many diseases, including typhus, poison ivy and rinderpest (disease of cattle especially destructive in the Philippines). Hospital Surgeon Benjamin Waterhouse brought vaccination for smallpox to the U.S.

> Army doctors wrote the first U.S. pharmacopoeia (1778) and the first U.S. bacteriology text (Sternberg, 1892).

> When William Beaumont made his famed observations on gastric juice through the window in Alexis St. Martin's stomach, he was a U.S. Army surgeon.

> The U.S. Army was the first to adopt compulsory immunization against yellow fever. It was the first to require physical examinations of officers.

> Colonel Louis Anatole LaGarde showed that "the act of firing does not sterilize a projectile" (1892).

Catalogue of Oddments. Colonel Hume's book is full of odd facts. Samples:

> The largest military hospital that ever existed in the U.S. was the Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond in the Civil War. It had 9,000 beds in 150 wooden buildings much like modern temporary barracks (the biggest present-day civil hospitals are state institutions for the insane, which rarely exceed 5,000 beds).

> Present Army regulations require a man exposed to venereal disease to visit a prophylactic station; an infected man must submit to treatment. But "in 1778 Congress passed an act subjecting any officer who entered a hospital for the cure of venereal disease to a fine of $10. Similarly, soldiers were fined $4."

> Army doctors kept the first official U.S. weather records, beginning in 1814.

Army Men. Colonel Hume dwells long on two great figures:

> Physician General Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence, a founder of the University of Pennsylvania, anthropologist, ethnologist, yellow-fever fighter, writer on alcoholism, writer of the first American book on insanity (1812). He was the first to suggest "that infected teeth could be the cause of general disease."

> Assistant Surgeon John Shaw Billings (1838-1913), "probably the greatest medical officer our Army has ever had. ... He developed the Army Medical Library, Washington, largest collection of medical literature the world has ever known; devised its Index Catalogue, greatest scientific bibliography of all time; consolidated the three New York libraries into the New York Public Library . . . planned the Johns Hopkins and Peter Bent Brigham Hospitals; was a pioneer in studies of ventilation and a successful military surgeon in campaign."

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