Between Flesh and Steel by Richard A. Gabriel

Author:Richard A. Gabriel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2013-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

France

The French medical corps was outdated, disorganized, and still suffered from the organizational and political effects of the army’s defeat at Waterloo. The political suspicions accompanying the Restoration compounded these problems, and the destabilization of the Revolution of 1848 and the rise of Napoleon III (1808–1873) followed. The turmoil of 1848 provoked widespread street fighting, and the French medical corps was pressed into service to treat the casualties with two significant results. First, French surgeons gained experience in using chloroform and standardized its use in the medical service. When the Crimean War broke out, the French administered chloroform as a matter of course and did so, they claimed, in thirty thousand operations during the war.93 Second, the political authorities recognized that the military medical service needed reform. In April 1848, the service began allowing its officers to exercise independent command of their own personnel and resources. The French were the first to take concrete steps to create an independent and autonomous military medical service. Unfortunately, when Minister of War Gen. Alphonse Henri d’Hautpoul (1789–1865) reversed these reforms a year later, the French medical service plunged into another period of disorganization.

General d’Hautpoul’s actions almost destroyed the service. He ordered that surgeons, physicians, and pharmacists be recruited exclusively from the graduates of civilian training institutions, so the French Army dismantled its military medical educational establishment. To prepare civilian medical personnel for military service, d’Hautpoul directed that they must take a one-year course in military medicine at the École d’Application de la Médicine Militaire at Val-de-Grâce. A year later, the French medical service equalized the status of physicians and surgeons by prescribing essentially the same refresher training for both, but it made no effort to assimilate these disciplines into the military’s ranks.94

The wars of Napoleon III all resulted in major medical disasters. Under d’Hautpoul’s medical system, the French entered the Crimean War with an acute shortage of medical officers, physicians, and surgeons. Before the war, the medical recruitment system had failed badly, and once the war broke out, it flunked completely. Few civilian medical personnel could be convinced of the value of military service, resulting in a precipitous decline in both numbers and quality. Between 1853 and 1855, of the eighty medical officer recruits required to fill out the ranks annually, the service attracted fewer than fifteen a year to take the examination. More damaging, of these, only four per year passed.95 During this period, the French Army in the Crimea expanded by ten battalions of infantry, enlarging the cavalry and artillery forces and creating an Imperial Guard. The French medical service never deployed sufficient medical personnel to serve this increased force. Moreover, of the 550 medical officers that served in the Crimea, eighty-three officers, or 15 percent, lost their lives.96

The medical disaster in the Crimea had even further negative consequences for the French medical service. The few remaining physicians after the war quickly left military service for calmer lives. Although the French created a new medical school at Strasbourg to train their replacements, it attracted few students.

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