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.

A history of U.S. Army medical activities from the Revolutionary War to 1818, the year in which congressional legislation instituted the modern Medical Department.

American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.