This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[306]
doing this the hospital stewards and nurses of the division were placed under his charge, and special details made from the regiments to assist.
A kitchen or cook-tent must be at once erected and the cooks put in possession of the articles mentioned as carried in the ambulance boxes and hospitalwagons, so that a sufficient amount of nourishing food could be prepared for immediate use.
Another assistant surgeon was detailed to keep a complete record of patients, with name, rank, company, and regiment, the nature of their wound, its treatment, etc. He was also required to see to the proper interment of those who died, and the placing of properly marked head-boards at their graves.
Then, there were in each of these division hospitals three surgeons, selected from the whole division, “without regard to rank, but solely on account of their known prudence, judgment, and skill,” whose duty it was to perform all important operations, or, at least, be responsible for their performance.
Three other medical officers were detailed to assist these three.
Nor was this all, for the remaining medical officers of the division, except one to a regiment, were also required to report at once to the hospital, to act as dressers of wounds and assistants generally.
In addition to these, a proper number of nurses and attendants were detailed to be on hand.
The medical officers left with regiments were required to establish themselves during the fighting in the rear of their respective organizations, at such a distance as not to unnecessarily expose themselves, where they could give such temporary aid to the wounded as they should stand in need of.
I have said that these hospitals were to be located out of all danger.
That statement needs a little modifying.
In case the tide of battle turned against our army and it was compelled to retreat, what was before a safe place might at once be converted into a place of great danger.
But a hospital could not be struck and its patients moved at a
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.