The History of the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps

Richard V. N. Ginn covers the history of the Medical Service Corps from its creation in August 1947 to 1994. He also examines the history of precursor organizations and, going back to the Revolutionary War, the history of those officers and men who, without benefit of formal organization, handled functions that were eventually assumed by the Corps, among them evacuation, supply, and administration.

When Colonel Ginn, a highly respected member of the Medical Service Corps, was assigned to write this book in 1983, the task had already been attempted with little success by several other officers. The Army’s custom of delegating the writing of corps histories to outstanding members of those corps regardless of their lack of experience in writing history is an unfortunate one more often marked by failure than by success. It results in a frustrating and ultimately humiliating experience for those accustomed to hard work but not to failure. That Ginn, who is not a trained historian, has succeeded where other officers could not is a remarkable achievement that may not be fully appreciated by those unfamiliar with the magnitude of the challenge he faced.

The greatest strengths of Ginn’s book are the thoroughness of his research, his understanding of the nature of the problems facing the Corps and its predecessors, and his eye for intriguing anecdotes and quotations that not only enliven the text but also provide a memorable picture that mere description could never give. His work suffers, however, from a number of problems either inherent in the nature of the material covered, or related to some degree to his lack of experience as a writing historian.

Among the unavoidable but nevertheless distressing problems that readers encounter is a mind-boggling reliance on acronyms in the later chapters of the book. Ginn does define acronyms on first use, but so many follow one upon the other that the reader’s memory begins to falter. Also difficult to avoid under the circumstances are problems resulting from writing a history that covers such a wide span of time—a task that, to be met with complete success, dictates a depth of knowledge and understanding not easy for even the experienced historian to achieve. While Ginn is apparently relatively comfortable dealing with the decades after World War I, he is less perceptive in his examination of the challenges of earlier periods. In dealing with World War I, for example, he concentrates on the formal plans developed for handling evacuation while essentially ignoring the difficulties experienced in the field, where the real story was improvisation and, all too often, disorganization in the face of overwhelming shortages of men, supplies, and transportation.

The book’s greatest weakness, however, is its somewhat fragmented nature, which tends to obscure the significance of the developments covered. Transitions between chapters, sections, and even paragraphs are too often weak, leaving readers to work out for themselves the relevance of the parts to the whole. A shifting focus contributes to the problem: events are not always seen from the point of view of the Medical Service Corps or its predecessors. Thus introductory paragraphs that provide the necessary background seem to be part of a general history rather than of one devoted exclusively to the Corps.

Nevertheless, while the forest in this volume is sometimes overwhelmed by the trees, requiring readers to do some of the work of pulling the parts into a meaningful whole for themselves, this failing should not be allowed to obscure the fact that because of the extensive research and careful notation (the footnote form is, however, unconventional), The History of the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps is an invaluable resource for historians and researchers. It provides insight into an area of military history that has, until now, been almost totally neglected.