Public Health and the US Military

Bobby Wintermute is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York. He received his PhD from Temple University in 2006. The US Army Center of Military History, the Army Heritage Center Foundation, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Rockefeller Archive Center supported the research and writing of this book.

• @contents:Introduction. Waging Health—The US Army Medical Officer’s Quest for Identity and Legitimacy 1. Practice, Status, Public Health and the Army Medical Officer, 1818-1890. 2. The Medical Officer in "The New School of Scientific Medicine", 1861-1898. 3. The Other War of 1898: The Army Medical Department’s Struggle with Disease in the Volunteer Camps 4. Making the Tropics Fit for White Men: Army Public Health in the American Imperial Periphery, 1898-1914. 5. The Ascendance of Sanitation in the Army Medical Department and the Quest for Preparedness, 1901-1917. 6. Vice and the Soldier: The Army Medical Department and Public Health as Morality, 1890-1917

‘For anyone who has wondered how the US Army Medical Department grew to achieve so much after such a baptism of fire in the Civil War, this book will fill in many of the gaps and complete a riveting story.’ – Nicholas Coni, Royal Society of Medicine‘Although not the first study of the U.S. Army Medical Department in recent decades, this is nonetheless a superb piece of research. Its strength lies in the author’s choice to focus not on combat medicine but rather on the transformative efforts of several talented surgeons general, and the endeavors of their sanitarians and researchers to achieve identity and gain legitimacy from the army and the public. The path to legitimacy, while strewn with impediments that Bobby A. Wintermute expertly details, was largely laid out by the time of America’s entry into World War II.’ – John S. Haller Jr., Emeritus, Journal of American History, Southern Illinois University, USA'Bobby A. Wintermute's new book consciously eschews battlefield medicine to demonstrate how military physicians used the field of public health to attain and maintain professional status in their separate–and sometimes competing–realms. In so doing, he has created a valuable resource for military and medical historians alike.' – CHOICE