page_title: Medical Corps (United States Army)
section_title: 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Medical Corps (United States Army) / History / 19th century
caption_attribution_description: English: The figure on foot in the right foreground shows a sergeant of light artillery in the all blue uniform trimmed with yellow prescribed in January 1812, when the light artillery became the first corps of the Army to do away with colored facings. The rank is recognizable by the two yellow silk epaulettes and red sash. The sergeaht wears a yeoman crowned shako a shako wider at the top than at the bottom -- with yellow cords, a yellow plate, and a red and white plume peculiar to the light artillery at this time. The horseman in the foreground is an infantry surgeon in the uniform adopted in January 1812. He is recognizable by the silver embroidered collar on his plain blue coat, the lack of epaulettes, and the black ostrich feather in his black bordered hat. Behind the infantry surgeon and partially obscured by him is a gun with its mounted crew preceded by a caisson. To the left in the background is a captain of light artillery in a blue coat with white breeches, with one gold epaulette on his right shoulder and three bars in the corner of his red, gold-laced, saddle cloth. To his left is a trumpeter of light artillery in a coat of red, the reversed color of the regimental uniform.
context_page_description: The Medical Corps of the U.S. Army is a staff corps of the U.S. Army Medical Department consisting of commissioned medical officers – physicians with either an M.D. or a D.O. degree, at least one year of post-graduate clinical training, and a state medical license.
  The MC traces its earliest origins to the first physicians recruited by the Medical Department of the Army, created by the Second Continental Congress in 1775. The US Congress made official the designation "Medical Corps" in 1908, although the term had long been in use informally among the Medical Department's regular physicians.
  Currently, the MC consists of over 4,400 active duty physicians representing all the specialties and subspecialties of civilian medicine. They may be assigned to fixed military medical facilities, to deployable combat units or to military medical research and development duties. They are considered fully deployable soldiers. The Chief of the Medical Corps Branch is a colonel and the senior-most Medical Corps officer in the Army is the U.S. Army Surgeon General, a lieutenant general.
context_section_description: During the period that followed (1789–1818) Congress provided for a medical organization for the Army only in time of war or emergency. For example, in 1812 Congress established the Medical Department of the Northern Army as a response to the need for medical support during operations in the War of 1812. In 1816, medical officers were given uniforms (but not military rank) for the first time. A permanent and continuous Medical Department was not established until 1818. That year a “Surgeon General” was appointed (Dr. Joseph Lovell, the first to hold that specific title) and since then a succession of Surgeons General and a permanent Corps organization in the Army Medical Department have followed. Physicians assigned to the U.S. Army were finally accorded military rank in 1847, although the old Regimental Surgeon system of additional designations ("Assistant Surgeon", "Surgeon") was also retained until 1908.
  In 1862, Surgeon General William Alexander Hammond proposed establishment of an "Army Medical School" in which medical cadets and others seeking admission to the MC could receive such post-graduate instruction as would better fit them for military commissions. It was over 30 years, however, before Surgeon General George M. Sternberg would found (1893) the Army Medical School (AMS), the precursor institution to today’s Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
caption: The horseman in the foreground is an infantry surgeon in the uniform adopted in January 1812.
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