They had more sophisticated wound treatment than anyone up to that time. They evacuated wounded legionnaires back down their well-organized support and logistics chains. They had medical corpsmen, whom they called “immunes.” They practiced front-line treatment, beginning with soldiers treating one another, and they appeared to have a casualty collection system within each legion. Their permanent camps included separate hospitals. Their camps were laid out in a way as to protect their water supply and to locate latrines downstream. They had a much better grasp of sanitation and supply than anyone else before, or for a long while after. The Roman army had organized field sanitation, well-designed camps, and separate companies of what we would now call field engineers. The Greeks had a long tradition of practical medicine, although handicapped with the “humoral” theory of disease. In the ancient world, Roman military medicine most closely approached what we have today. On the other hand, the Persians, whose empire stretched from the Middle East to India around 500 BCE, had no military medical service, and very rudimentary wound treatment. Babylonian-Assyrian medicine (1000-600 BCE) had physician-priests for magic and ritual, but also had the “asu,” pragmatic practitioners who became the first full-time military physicians. This can be seen as the beginning of a formal military medical service. Egyptian clinical practitioners were deployed to garrison posts. The Smith Papyrus (1600 BCE) describes wound treatment, fracture splinting, and cauterization to control bleeding. In ancient Egypt, for example, medicine was both sophisticated and highly specialized. But wound care and medicine itself varied widely from one culture to another. The treatment of casualties is very obviously an inherent part of military organization. The latest archeologic evidence is clear that they were not.īut when we say that armies of the ancient world were organized, that does not follow that they were organized as we would do so today. Initially, it was thought that the meso-American civilization of the Maya were peaceful. All were agriculturally-based, and featured organized governments and armies supported by hereditary ruling and military castes. In chronologic order, from around 4000 BCE to around 1500 BCE, these were the Middle East, in Mesopotamia and Egypt the Indus River valley, in present-day Pakistan and India the Yangtze River valley in China and the Americas, specifically meso-America and the Andes. Primary civilizations appeared in four areas, widely separated in time and place. What is this human activity that we call war? When did they invent it? How does it differ from simple fighting? As noted above, the definition of war includes nations, states, or their equivalent. It was in fact during the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the 19 th century that the organized practice of military medicine began, and it didn’t reach its modern form until the beginning of the 20 th century. Yet, what we now call military medicine is really a product of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. So one can make the argument that military medicine should go back a very long way. People were fighting and hurting one another back into the old stone age, long before organized societies and armies. Care of the injured soldier is as old as war.
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