Bøger af Mary C Gillett

"The Army Medical Department, 1917-1941," completes a four-volume study covering the years from 1775 to 1941. Although the Medical Department had improved medical standards and practices because of the latest advances in scientific medicine and was making significant progress toward creating an organizational structure and a supply system able to handle the demands of a conflict of any size, its reserves of trained personnel and supplies were seriously inadequate when the nation entered World War I in the spring of 1917. The narrative first describes the struggle of an unprepared department to meet the myriad demands of a war of unprecedented size and complexity, then follows postwar efforts to meet the needs of the peacetime army during nearly two decades of continental isolationism and budgetary neglect, and finally covers the brief period of growing awareness of America's probable involvement in another major conflict and the intensive preparation efforts that ensued. Taken together, Gillett's four volumes provide a wealth of information on the development of the Army Medical Department and its contributions to scientific medicine. They also challenge long-standing myths that during times of crisis effective medical organizations can be created with relative ease and that the advances in one or more medical specialties do not have a deep and lasting impact on the profession's many other fields of endeavor, from hospital organization to emergency medical procedures and evacuation policies and methods. In sum, Gillett's four-volume compendium will be a welcome addition to command libraries of all officers responsible for the health of their soldiers while also benefiting greatly those interested in the history of military medicine. However, The Army Medical Department, 1917-1941, has a much broader application than the basic subject matter would suggest. Its major lessons tell much about how the Army continually attempts to transform itself to meet the exigencies of its ever-changing environment; underscore the impact of key leaders in times of crisis; and highlight the value of careful planning, organizational flexibility, and decisive implementation to achieve the most beneficial results.

The second in a projected four-volume series that will cover the history of the Army Medical Department from 1775 to 194 1, this volume traces the development of the department from its establishment on a permanent basis in 1818 through the final days of the Civil War in 1865. The uninterrupted existence of the Medical Department after 1818 made possible the gradual transformation of its staff from a collection of physicians of varying skills and attitudes into a group of highly trained and disciplined medical officers, proud of their organization and of their roles in it. Although the state of the art of medicine before 1865 gave the military surgeon few effective weapons again stillness and infection, after 1818, as this most recent volume in the series demonstrates, the length of the military career of the average medical officer and his professional attitude toward the challenges he met led him to concentrate his efforts on the Army's health problems and to work persistently to improvise ways in which to meet them. The Army Medical Department, 1818-1865 is, like its predecessor, a significant and long-needed contribution to the history of military medicine.

The third in a projected four-volume work that will cover the history of the Army Medical Department from 1775 to 1941, this volume traces the development of the department from its rebirth as a small, scattered organization in the wake of the Civil War, through the trials of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, up to the entrance of the United States into World War l. A time of revolutionary change both in the organization of the U.S. Army and in medicine, the period climaxed with the golden age of Army medicine, when U.S. medical officers played a leading role in research that developed new and effective weapons in the war against epidemic disease. The Army Medical Department, 1865-1917, continues the contributions to the history of military medicine initiated by the preceding volumes.

This is the first volume of a history of the U.S. Army Medical Department from the start of the American Revolution to World War I. This book deals with the period when the Medical Department existed only as a wartime expedient and concludes with the passage in April 18 18 of the law that fin ally established the department on a permanent basis. Future volumes will describe all aspects of the medical care of soldiers scattered in small units over the rapidly growing nation and the challenges posed by war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discipline that governed 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 scholarly community, or by the public at large. This new history of the Army Medical Department tells the beginning of that story. It is a significant and long needed contribution to the study of military medicine.

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 scholarly community, or by the public at large. This new history of the Army Medical Department tells the beginning of that story. It is a significant and long needed contribution to the study of military medicine.