History of The Portable Surgical Hospitals
During the summer and fall of 1942, a team of Medical Corps officers modified the basic War Department Table of Organization and Equipment (T/O&E) for a standard 25-bed station hospital (T/O&E 8-560, 22 July 1942) into a new theater T/O and table of basic allowances (T/BA) (T/O 8-508-S-SWPA, 31 October 1942) for a portable hospital of 25-beds. The new unit was capable of supporting small units in its camp-type version (with 4 female Army nurses and organic vehicles) or battalion and regimental combat teams in its task force version (without the 4 nurses and organic vehicles). Commanded by a Medical Corps captain or major, the new 29-man portable hospital had 4 medical officers (3 general surgeons and a general surgeon/anesthetist) and 25 enlisted men, including 2 surgical and 11 medical technicians.
What really marked a radical departure was that all of the unit's equipment, medical and surgical supplies, and rations could weigh no more than the 29 men could personally transport. Hastily assembled and trained, the portable hospitals suffered from many shortcomings in personnel and equipment, which would soon become obvious in jungle fighting. Probably the single most critical problem was the severe limitation placed on the total weight to assure the unit’s portability. From the start, this meant that to be portable, the unit had to give up medical and surgical equipment and supplies that would have been most useful in the field.
Read more about this topic: Portable Surgical Hospital
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history, portable, surgical and/or hospitals:
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
““Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sveetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ‘cos his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a portable tinder-box.””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“With all the surgical skill and the vital rays lavished on him he should talk like a—like a congressman at a filibuster.”
—Kenneth Langtry. Herbert L. Strock. Prof. Frankenstein (Whit Bissell)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)