At the beginning of April, 1917, there were in the Medical Department 750 medical officers in regular service and 2,600 in reserve. The army nurse corps numbered 400 and there was an enlisted personnel of 6,600. There were seven army hospitals with a bed capacity of 5,000, aside from a few small and unimportant post hospitals. A year and a half later it had a larger personnel than that of the entire American army at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war. It numbered then 40,000 officers, 21,000 nurses and 245,000 men. In the United States there were over eighty fully equipped hospitals with a capacity of 120,000 patients and operating with the American Expeditionary Force were 219 base and camp hospitals having a capacity of 284,000 patients. It was estimated that nearly one-third of the entire medical profession in the Union went into active service with the Army and among their numbers were many of the most distinguished physicians and surgeons in the country. Of those who went overseas, nearly half that number, over 1,000, were detailed to serve with the British forces. As an instance of the speed with which it was necessary to work to secure the needed expansion for the care of war’s wreckage the story of the building of one of the New York City debarkation hospitals is illuminating. Several acres of ground on Staten Island were secured for it and the entire plant, consisting of eighty-six buildings, including a theater of seven thousand seating capacity, with heating plant and electric light, water and sewage connections, was finished and ready for use within one hundred days from the turning of the first spadeful of earth in the preparation of the site. Its normal accommodation was for 1,500 patients, but it was so planned that it could be easily and quickly expanded to care for three times that number. One of its buildings, measuring 230 by 30 feet, was begun in the morning, finished by noon of the same day, and equipped by night. Hospital facilities in France had also to be created quickly and equipped at once with all the means of treating the victims of scientific warfare that the needs of the time had evolved. One such big institution in the Cote d’Or region, for the building of which railways had to be run to the site and concrete mixers set up and kept going day and night until it was finished, had 600 buildings of a permanent type and was, in effect, a series of ten hospitals in one, each devoted to its own specialty and having its own staff of thirty physicians and surgeons, a hundred nurses and twice as many men of the Medical and Sanitary Corps, and its own operating rooms, laboratories, kitchens, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, administration buildings and buildings for patients. A laundry capable of doing the work for 30,000 people served the entire plant. The hospital cared for 25,000 at a time and beside it was a convalescent camp having facilities for all manner of outdoor games