Page 8 - The Story of the RAMC

depots which stopped a dangerous drain on the armies and thus kept many thousands of trained men in the field. It was he who introduced a system of registering casualties which forms the basis of the medical statistical returns in use today. Furthermore he started a Benevolent Fund and Widows and Orphans Fund, both of which remain in a flourishing condition to this day.
He held the position of Director General for no less than 36 years and his name is commemorated in the McGrigor Barracks at Aldershot.
During the forty years which followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18th 1815 the British Army forgot the lessons it had so hardly learned during the Peninsular War. Officers were drawn from the wealthy and aristocratic classes and too many of them looked upon their service as a pleasant way of spending their time before inheriting their estates. Soldiering for them was a matter of fantastically elaborate uniforms, massive reviews and carefully rehearsed cavalry charges across Wimbledon Common.
Having been waited on by hosts of servants since babyhood they had little or no interest in the domestic “chores” of the Regiment, such as feeding, housing and medical care.
When therefore, contrary to all our expectations, we became involved in a war with Russia in 1854 the position might be compared with a football team which is composed entirely of a dashing forward line while those whose duty it was to support them up to their opponents’ goal mouth, the backs and half-backs, consisted of what were officially known as “Civil Departments”, largely untrained in war. These were the men who were responsible for clothing, feeding, housing and medical care.
The disastrous consequences of sending this semi-civilianised army to face the realities of war are now a matter of history.
During the Crimean War the medical organisation was to a great extent based on a peacetime arrangement of “regimental hospitals”. The medical officer, though he was commissioned and wore the uniform of his regiment, had no military rank and, like the Quartermaster, was almost entirely under the command of the Colonel of his Regiment. He had no trained staff except men detailed from the Regiment who received only such instruction as he could give them. They were men selected in the familiar old fashioned army way, when the sergeant major announces on parade “Three Volunteers wanted for hospital duties, Pte. X, Y, Z right turn, quick march and report to the hospital”!
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