Page 10 - The Story of the RAMC

from the other ranks who were largely administered by officers from the fighting services known as “Captains of Orderlies”.
We have seen how, 40 years after Waterloo the neglect of the medical services led to the disaster of the Crimea; almost 40 years after this it looked as thought history was going to repeat itself.
Luckily it did not require another war to bring the country to its senses, for a group of influential doctors got together and addressed a long memorandum to the Secretary of State for War. They certainly did not pull their punches. “Only two factors” they wrote “seem ranged against Army Medical Reform, unwise economy and unreasoning prejudice at the War Office” and they added “that it this state of things continued and if we were involved in war ... it is difficult to see how we could avoid the utter collapse of the medical arrangements, a spectacle of misery and mortality to equal which we must look back to the horrors of the Crimea”.
The events which resulted from this historic document will be discussed in the next chapter.
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