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The Royal Army Medical Corps History

1190 BC

The sons of Aesculapius (the “Father of Medicine”) both served as doctors in the armies of Greece at the siege of Troy.  A Greek poet writing about the Trojan wars described the earliest account of a regimental aid post.  He tells how one of Aesculapius sons was summoned to treat the bow shot wound of the General  Menelaos and having removed the arrow spread soothing drugs onto the wound.

1256 BC

 Aesculapius lived in Epidaurus Greece.

Legend tells us how Aesculapius became such an expert physician that he was able to bring the dead back to life, and consequently Hell becoming increasingly empty.  Pluto, the god of the underworld, complained to Jupiter the head of all gods that he was being deprived of his clients.  Jupiter obliged by slaying Aesculapius with a thunderbolt.  However Aesculapius then became a god himself and was worshipped in hundreds of temples throughout the Middle East.  These temples were also used as hospitals and each contained a circular pit containing a harmless variety of snake whose forked tongue was thought to have healing properties when applied to disease parts of the body.

Ever since, the “Rod and Serpent” has been the sign of the art and science of medicine throughout the world.

The dark times that followed saw medical services provided only by the camp followers.

In the Middle Ages the English forces consisted of a number of “private armies” raised by the great feudal barons with their knights, squires and men-at-arms.  Many of these brought their own private doctors with them, who, having dealt with the VIPs, would, in their charity, treat any of the rank and file who might be able to get to them.

1552AD

Ambrose Paré, a famous French surgeon describes how, when the Grand Master of the Artillery was returning to his tent with a wound in his shoulder, a crowd of wounded soldiers trailed after him hoping that his doctor would be able to find time to give them some treatment.

1660AD

Following the restoration of Charles II, the Standing Regular Army was formed.  For the first time a career was provided for a medical officer, both in peacetime and in war.  The Army was formed entirely on a regimental basis, and a medical officer with a warrant officer as his mate was appointed to the regiment, which also provided the hospital.  The medical officer was thus for the first time concerned in the continuing health of his troops, and not solely with surgical heroics on the battlefield.

1898AD

At a Guildhall dinner in 1898 a speech, given by Lord Lansdown, announced the intention to form a single Corps on a new footing. He spoke of an estrangement between the Army and the profession, a shortage of the right candidate and the need for a fresh start.

The Queen assented to bestow the prefix 'Royal'. A badge with the international medical sign, the serpent and rod was designed including a laurel and the Royal Crown and the Royal Army Medical Corps was established by Royal Warrant.

This advancement in military medicine still lacked practical change, the distribution of medical officers remained unchanged with no prospects of promotion, and there were no specialists or dentists recruited.

The first battle for the Corps was in 1898, the battle of Omdurman, a battle that brought fame to Major-General Kitchener and a taste for cavalry tactics for the then Lieutenant Winston Churchill, the battle was such a victory that only twenty eight British troops were killed and there were only 434 wounded. The Corps was not exposed to the severest test, but Kitchener still praised the work of the Corps, due to his previously alleged neglect of the wounded in an earlier battle.
The general medical arrangements were all that could be desired. This had been attained, he said, 'by the unremitting energy, the untiring zeal and devotion to their duty by the entire medical staff.'

1899AD

In the Boer war in 1899, there was a shortage of medical staff, due, mainly to the age of the Corps. Little preparation was given and it was considered a joke that a few Boer Farmers could give the British Army any trouble, despite the previous annihilation of the British Army by the Boers at Majuba Hill, twenty years previously. Consequently arrangements both military and medical were far from perfect which the events of the war quickly revealed.

As always, the transport for the wounded was a prime difficulty and even the shortest of journeys for a badly wounded man in an ox-cart must have been unbearable, damaging and sometimes even fatal.
 
The main killer in the war, was not the enemy, but typhoid bacillus, the infected men soon outnumbering the wounded.  The standards of hygiene were still extremely poor, Lord Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, took the view that the most useless officer in the Army was the Sanitation Officer. The simplest of precautions were often neglected, such as boiling all drinking water, this leading to an epidemic of bowel infections which affected over 100,000 soldiers.
The general attitude of hygiene was summed up by a Royal Commission as:

'regarding hygiene and sanitation, Tommy doesn't understand it, and his officer regards it as just a fad.'

During the war, 14,000 selected men were inoculated against typhoid, yet the incidence of typhoid in those inoculated was only halved. The final score between bullets and disease during the Boer War was 14,000 dead from disease and 6,000 killed in action, while the sick greatly outnumbered war wounded.

In general the Boer War was a war of rapid movement. The initial stage of the war was marred for the British by the three defeats in the depressing 'Black Week' of December 1899. In one of these battles Lord Methuen with 8,000 men were badly beaten at Magersfontien. Yet this unhappy battle has a special place in the History of the Royal Army Medical Corps.
For there were shrewd, and surprisingly impartial observers from the German General Staff, who reported to their masters on the RAMC in action.:

'The splendid services of the Royal Army Medical Corps still remain to be noticed, the officers, NCO's and bearers had traversed repeatedly, with the greatest coolness, the fire swept zone, which was nearly a mile in depth. On the 11 December they brought in, partly from the firing line, 500 wounded, dressed their wounds, and brought them down......to be evacuated by rail to Cape Town.......nor was it only in the British ranks that these men gave their services, for they did the same when asked by the enemy for aid.'

The Medical Services were indirectly involved in the disastrous so called 'Concentration Camps' organised by Kitchener and his staff in order to protect the Boer women and children. The intentions of the camps were good, but the results terrible, the 46 camps that were set up housed 117,000 inmates of which 20,000 died labeling the British as brutal which Dr Goebbels and others later exploited.

Of course, no one was more exposed to the risk of disease than the medical officers, nursing staff and orderlies within the improvised cramped hospitals, surrounded by infectious patients and contaminated materials of all kinds. It can hardly be surprising that over 300 members of the Corps paid with their lives for this form of devotion, while their awards for gallantry on the field of battle were on a scale only surpassed by the Royal Artillery and included six Victoria Crosses.

Following the Boer War, the new Director General Sir Alfred Keogh carried the through the changes which turned the RAMC into a proper medical service an encouraged research against typhoid and set up a proper school of Army Hygiene at Mytchett near Aldershot, and soldiers form the whole Army were taught there. As conditions in the RAMC and Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing service improved, doctors and nurses flocked to join.

Keogh also helped create the Territorial Force which would be the forerunner of the Territorial Army.

1914AD

When the Great War arrived, the RAMC was prepared. The Army had good hygiene advice and a large backup of territorials to take over as soon as the Regular Army had mobilized.

The Great War saw the RAMC facing new terrors of gas weapons, gangrene wounds and enormous numbers of dead and wounded to tend too. By the end of the Great War the RAMC was equal in size to the entire BEF of 1914. The Army Health and Hygiene measures adopted so successfully by the Corps, both in France and the Middle East, were proved excellent.

1938AD

 RAMC units still continued worldwide after the Great War ended and both the Regular and TA RAMC were reduced in size until Munich in 1938 forced hurried increases in size. The Second World War saw further advances in battlefield medicine, hygiene and inoculation against Malaria especially in the Burma campaigns.

After the Second World War, the RAMC moved with the British Army in campaigns like Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus and in the Falklands and Gulf War the RAMC played a vital role, a thousand Volunteer reservists in the TA Army medical Services being called up to make up shortages in the Regular Army Medical Services in 1991.

1993AD– Present

Bosnia and Kosovo also pushed the RAMC to it’s limits.  Although the TA were not yet been mobilized, large numbers of TA RAMC volunteered their services to ease the burden on the Regular Army.