Your Excellencies –

Of the fourteen hundred medical practitioners who served in the Continental Army, only about ten percent had formal medical degrees. The majority of the rest had learned their practice through an apprenticeship with an established physician. Most were young men at the beginning of their careers. Few had prior experience of war. Their civilian practices had not prepared them for the grim realities of warfare in eighteenth- century America, where far more soldiers under their care would die from disease and infection than would be killed on the battlefield.

Undaunted by these challenges, the healers played as critical a role in the war’s outcome as that of the warriors on the front lines. The field of military medicine was in its infancy at the time of the American Revolution. A generation earlier, Sir John Pringle had transformed medical care in the British army by emphasizing the need for order, cleanliness, sanitation, and ventilation in military hospitals. Published a century before the discovery of microbes and antibiotics, Pringle’s Observations on Diseases of the Army was a pioneering work in the prevention of contagion and cross-contamination in treating the sick and wounded. Working under constrained and often brutal conditions— and with a perpetual shortage of medicines, supplies, and personnel—American military doctors drew from Pringle and other writers to forge a system of medical care for the army based in the prevailing science of the time.

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From the exhibition Saving Soldiers: Medical Practice in the Revolutionary War, on view April 1 - November 27, 2022, at Anderson House, headquarters of the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, Inc., 2118 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008