Public Health and the U.S. Military

Bobby Wintermute is interested in what the U.S. military doctor was doing when he was not at war; in this account, he deliberately “eschew[s] combat medicine” (5) in order to focus on the army physician's professional aspirations and role in promoting public health and hygienic reform. Early in the volume, Wintermute emphasizes the peculiar occupational status of the army doctor, who desired respect both as a man of medicine and as an officer in the army. Although full surgeons carried the rank of major in the nineteenth century, that was a commission for convenience only, which determined their pay scale and housing, but did not carry the same authority or privileges of rank accorded to line officers. They had no place, in Wintermute's phrase, in the “command structure and culture of rank” (25) basic to the army life. If the regular military man epitomized all that was masculine, the physician was somewhat feminized by his association with the female role of caring for the sick. This meant that even as late as the Spanish-American war, medical officers lacked the authority they needed to enforce sanitary regulations and camp hygiene, to the detriment of troop health.

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