The Historical Division offers the following lectures:

• An Ambulating Hospital
• Do Our Best for the Wounded
• Legacy
• The Medical Department of the Imperial Japanese Army
• Reengineering the Body: Joint Prostheses in the Human Body

Some of the above courses have been used by area hospitals for Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits. Sample CME objectives are available upon request.

An Ambulating Hospital:

The Hospital Trains of The U.S. Army during the Civil War

The U.S. Army Medical Department was not prepared for the carnage of the Civil War with its modern and accurate weaponry. Methods used to evacuate the wounded in previous wars proved inadequate. Ambulances and stretchers were developed to get casualties off the battlefield and a doctrine for removing the wounded was developed by Surgeon Jonathan Letterman. However, the Letterman plan did not deal with what to do with the wounded after they got to the Field Hospital and a complex system of railroads and General Hospitals developed to handle the wounded. When the soldier could withstand the trip, rail transportation gave the Army the ability to move large numbers of casualties from field hospitals directly to specialized hospitals where they could receive quality long-term care.

Lecture with 35mm slides

Themes: TRANSPORTATION OF PATIENTS; MILITARY MEDICINE; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 19TH CENTURY

Time: 60 minutes

Do Our Best for the Wounded:

The Medical Department Of the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam

The effort by the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) to provide medical care to their wounded soldiers is one of the untold stories of the Vietnam War. Despite impossible logistics, primitive conditions and inadequate supplies, the NLF attempted to create a modern military medical department that provided for medical evacuation, aseptic surgery and the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and medical instruments. In addition to providing medical care, the Viet Cong compounded pharmaceuticals and manufactured medical instruments. They sought to combine the best of western medical principals with traditional Vietnamese medical practices. This lecture will explore the effort the Viet Cong made on behalf of their wounded as well as their successes and failures. The NLF saw their medical efforts as an integral part of their military campaign and an important justification of the society they intended to create

Lecture with 35mm slides

Themes: VIETNAM; MILITARY MEDICINE; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 20TH CENTURY

Time: 60 minutes

Legacy

One of the legacies of William A. Hammond's tenure as Surgeon General of the U.S. Army was the establishment of the Army Medical Museum (now the National Museum of Health and Medicine of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) to collect pathological specimens for the study of disease and trauma. However, the museum began a collection of medical instruments to document the achievements of the U.S. Army Medical Department during the war. In addition to serving a repository for standard issue, the collection also served as a kind of technological library allowing military surgeons to test cutting edge medical technologies.

Lecture with 35mm slides

Themes: MUSEUMS; MILITARY MEDICINE; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 19TH CENTURY

Time: 30 minutes

The Medical Department of the Imperial Japanese Army

After the victory of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the Imperial Japanese Army Model was considered to be the model for how to provide healthcare to soldiers under wartime conditions. However, combat in the South Pacific less than forty years later exposed Japanese military medicine as ineffective, disorganized and contributing to the incredible losses sustained by the Japanese during the Second World War. Japanese Medical Department provided their doctors with sophisticated medical instruments, often better than the equivalent American instruments, but the equipment did not translate into quality medical care provided to the troops. Inadequate preparation by the Japanese commanders forced their doctors who frequently had patients that they were unable to evacuate out of the combat zone to make unethical decisions.

Lecture with Slides

Themes: JAPAN; MILITARY MEDICINE; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 20TH CENTURY

Time: 30 minutes or 60 minutes

Reengineering the Body, Joint Prostheses in the Human Body

The first total joint arthroplasties were attempted in the late nineteenth century by Jules Emile Pean and Thermistocles Gluck. While these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful and had to be removed, they set the stage for further work in the mid-twentieth century. Based on success with total hip prostheses, surgeons underestimated the stresses and difficulty of replacing the knee joint. Early efforts attempted to duplicate the function of the knee without understanding how the knee actually articulated. The development of the total knee prosthesis forced surgeons to study knee anatomy, which ultimately led to successful prosthetics.

Lecture with Slides

Themes: JOINT PROSTHESIS; KNEE PROSTHESIS; HIP PROSTHESIS; ARTHROPLASTY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE, 20TH CENTURY

Time: 30 minutes