throat), orthopedics, urology, and Roentgenology; and finally that vast organization for the care of the wounded whose operations began with the stretcher-bearers out in No Man’s Land and ended only when the men had passed out of the great general hospitals in the homeland with the wound-chevrons on their sleeves. When, in the past, we have been suddenly confronted by the necessity of making war, we have had to do our organizing after the beginning of hostilities. And, though the titanic conflict had been in progress for more than two years and a half before we entered it, we ran true to form, being as unprepared for war from a medical standpoint as we were from an ordnance, an artillery, or an aviation, point of view. Barring the superficial experience gained by some of our medical officers during the mobilization on the Mexican border, our medical preparations were all made after war had been declared. This unpreparedness was not the fault of the heads of the Medical Department, mind you; it was not due to carelessness or lack of foresight, but was, instead, the logical result of a deliberate policy of those who held that to be prepared for war was to invite war. When the war-cloud broke, it became necessary, therefore, to build overnight, and virtually from the ground up, a mammoth and highly complex organization. When war was declared, the Medical Department, including the Medical Corps, the Dental Corps, the Veterinary Corps, and their respective reserves, had barely 700 commissioned officers on duty in the United States and its possessions. Though the regular Medical Corps included many officers whose achievements had contributed very largely to the prevention of disease and the amelioration of suffering in all parts of the world—it has been said of former Surgeon-General Gorgas that he “made the Canal possible and the tropics habitable”—and though these officers were skilled in preventive medicine, field sanitation, and other phases of the work of the army surgeon, there was, after all, only a handful of them. It became necessary, therefore, to provide, on the instant, not only for an enormously augmented personnel but also for new and unconsidered conditions. An ambulance service had to be organized and vehicles for it had to be designed and manufactured; hospital trains had to be built—there was only one in the United States when the war began; antiseptic methods in field surgery had to be devised as a substitute for the complete surgical cleanliness possible only under peace conditions; a system had to be devised and put in operation which would insure the prompt collection of the wounded on the battle-field and their rapid evacuation; measures had to be taken for the reconstruction of the severely wounded and their training for future efficiency in civil life.