Medical Corps (United States Army)

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The U.S. Army Medical Corps Branch Plaque

The Medical Corps of the U.S. Army (MC) is a staff corps (non-combat specialty branch) of the U.S. Army Medical Department (AMEDD) consisting of commissioned medical officers — physicians with either an MD or a DO degree and at least one year of post-graduate clinical training. The MC traces its earliest origins to the first physicians recruited by the Medical Department of the Army, created by the Continental Congress in 1775. Congress made official the designation "Medical Corps" in 1908, although the term had long been in use informally among the AMEDD's regular physicians.

Currently, the MC consists of about ???? physicians representing all the specialties and subspecialties of civilian medicine. They may be assigned to fixed military medical facilities, to deployable combat units or to military medical research and development duties. They are considered fully deployable soldiers. The Chief of the Medical Corps is a major general and the senior-most Medical Corps officer is the U.S. Army Surgeon General, a lieutenant general.

[edit] History

Both the Army Medical Department and the Medical Corps trace their origins to 27 July 1775, when the Continental Congress established the first Army Hospital to be headed by a "Director General and Chief Physician". The language of the Congressional resolution spoke of “an Hospital” which in those days meant a hospital system or medical department. Among the accomplishments of Army surgeons during the years of the Revolution was completion (in 1778, at Lititz, Pennsylvania) of the first pharmacopoeia printed in America. In 1789, the Department of the Hospital was disbanded and a system of "Regimental Surgeons" was established in its place.

During the period that followed (1789-1818) Congress provided for a medical organization for the Army only in time of war or emergency. For example, in 1812 Congress established the Medical Department of the Northern Army as a response to the need for medical support during operations in the War of 1812. In 1816, medical officers were given uniforms (but not military rank) for the first time. A permanent and continuous Medical Department was not established until 1818. That year a “Surgeon General” was appointed (Dr. Joseph Lovell, the first to hold that specific title) and since then a succession of Surgeons General and a permanent Corps organization in the Army Medical Department have followed. Physicians assigned to the U.S. Army were finally accorded military rank in 1847, although the old Regimental Surgeon system of additional designations ("Assistant Surgeon", "Surgeon") was also retained until 1908.

In 1862, Surgeon General William Alexander Hammond proposed establishment of an "Army Medical School" in which medical cadets and others seeking admission to the MC could receive such post-graduate instruction as would better fit them for military commissions. It was over 30 years, however, before Surgeon General George M. Sternberg would found (1893) the Army Medical School (AMS), the precursor institution to today’s Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

World War I brought a realization of the need to provide more than the “finishing school” approach of the AMS to military medical education and indoctrination and in 1920, the AMEDD first established hospital internships as a method of acquiring new officers for the MC. Meanwhile, the role of the AMS (which would become the Army Medical Center in 1923) was taken over by the new Medical Field Service School which opened at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania in 1921. Its purpose was to train both new medical officers and newly enlisted medics in the practice of field medicine. (This school was transferred to Texas in 1973 and became the Academy of Health Sciences – known since 1991 as the AMEDD Center and School).

The first woman to receive a Regular Army commission in the MC was Major Margaret D. Craighill in 1943. She was assigned as Chief Surgeon to the Women’s Army Corps. In 1946, Army residency programs for MC officers were introduced into the AMEDD, providing for the first time the full spectrum of graduate medical education to prospective MC officers. (Completing this trend, medical school training has been provided for military students since the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) was established in 1972, graduating its first class in 1980. USUHS is the United States' center for military medical education. Its primary mission is to prepare its graduates for service in the medical corps of all the uniformed services of the country.)

[edit] References

Engleman, Rose C. and Robert T. J. Joy (1975), “200 Years of Military Medicine”, The Historical Unit of the US Army Medical Department, Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Gillett, Mary C. (1981), The Army Medical Department, 1775-1818, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army. (Series: Army Historical Series)
Gillett, Mary C. (1987), The Army Medical Department, 1818-1865, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army. (Series: Army Historical Series)
Gillett, Mary C. (1995), The Army Medical Department, 1865-1917, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army. (Series: Army Historical Series)