On July 4, 1862 Dr. Jonathan Letterman
replaced
Surgeon General Charles S. Tripler,
commander of
the
Army of the
Potomac Medical Department. Letterman
organized
ambulance service into corps and
division units,
staffed by soldiers
chosen by Medical Department officers.
Drills
were
intensified and done more frequently. By
the
Battle
of Antietam
on September 17, 1862, the performance
of
Letterman's ambulance corps had improved
significantly. Stretcher-bearers
first carried the wounded to primary
stations,
then
loaded them into ambulances to be
transported to
the
field
hospitals on a fixed schedule with
regular stops
en
route.
After several attempts, the Ambulance
Corps Act
was
finally passed on March 11, 1864. It
established
the
corps as a
regular army unit and gave the Medical
Department
the right to train and examine men for
duty.
How to collect and transport the wounded
was
a major problem during the first part of
the Civil
War. The
failure of the medical services to
provide for
moving the wounded from regimental aid
stations to
large hospitals
set up in the rear of the battlefields
caused
unnecessary suffering and death.
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