The six were organized at leading hospitals and medical schools: the
Presbyterian Hospital of New York, with Doctor George E. Brewer in
command; the Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, with Doctor George W. Crile;
the Medical School of Harvard University, with Doctor Harvey Cushing;
the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, with Doctor Richard Harte; the
Medical School of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, with
Doctor Frederick Besley, and Washington University Hospital, Saint
Louis, with Doctor Frederick T. Murphy.
A little while later the Postgraduate unit went from New York, the
Roosevelt Hospital unit from there, and the Johns Hopkins unit from
Baltimore. Many others followed in due time.
These hospital units, recruited and organized under the Red Cross, took
their full complement of surgeons, physicians, and nurses. All these
became members of the army as soon as they landed in France, and they
were supplemented, either there or before they crossed, with members of
Medical Corps, enlisted just after America entered the war.
The military rank of the physicians and surgeons conformed in a general
way to the unofficial rank of the same men when they had worked together
in the hospitals from which they came. There were, of course, some
exceptions to this rule, but not enough to make it no rule at all.
It was true of the medicoes, as it was of the engineers, that they took
military discipline none too seriously, because they brought a
discipline of their own. Wherever, in civilian pursuits, the lives of
others hang on prompt obedience, there is a strictness which no
military strictness can outdo. This was true of the personnel of any
hospital in America, before there was thought of war. It was equally
true, of course, after the units were established behind the
fighting-lines. But there was a certain lack of prompt salute and a
certain freedom with first names which not the stoutest management from
the military arm of the service could obliterate from the base
hospitals. The Medical Corps enlisted men were naturally not sinners in
this respect. The routine work of the base hospitals all fell to them.
It was usually a sergeant of the army--though he was never a
veteran--who attended the reception-rooms, kept account of symptoms,
clothes, and first and second names, and did the work of orderly in the
hospital. It was the privates who kept the mess and washed the dishes
and changed the sheets.
The nurses went under military discipline and into military
segregation--sometimes a little nettlesome, when the hospitals were far
from companionship of any outside sort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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