Robert Maitland O ' Reilly Robert Maitland O ' Reilly ( January 14 , 1845 – November 3 , 1912 ) was the 20th Surgeon General of the United States Army , serving from September 7 , 1902 to January 14 , 1909 . O ' Reilly was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania to John and Ellen ( Maitland ) O ' Reilly . He was a descendant of General Alexander O ' Reilly who was a captain general of Cuba and one of the Spanish governors of Louisiana . The American branch settled in Pennsylvania before the American Revolution . O ' Reilly was educated in the Public Schools of his native city . Civil War . O ' Reilly had commenced the study of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania when the Civil War broke out . In August 1862 , he was appointed an acting medical cadet and was assigned for duty in Cuyler General Hospital in Philadelphia . Later he served as a medical cadet in a hospital at Chattanooga , Tennessee , and in the office of the medical director of the Army of the Cumberland . After the Civil War . With the close of the Civil War , he resumed his medical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated 1866 . On May 14 , 1867 , O ' Reilly was appointed assistant surgeon in the army and sent to Fort Trumbull , Connecticut . Shortly thereafter he was sent out to California by way of Nicaragua with a shipment of recruits . While en route with recruits from San Francisco to Whipple Barracks , Arizona , he was wounded by the accidental discharge of a revolver at Camp Mud Springs , California , and was under treatment for some time at Drum Barracks after which he proceeded to his original assignment in Arizona . He served at Camp Date Creek , Fort McDowell , Camp Renon , Fort Whipple , Camp Halleck , and Fort Union , all in the extreme southwest , until June 1870 , during which time he saw considerable field service against Native Americans . Mid - 1870 was spent in the field in Colorado with the 8th Cavalry , after which he was assigned for station at Fort Laramie , Wyoming , where he served from May 1871 to July 1874 . He participated in the campaign of 1874 against the Sioux and at the conclusion of that campaign he took station at Fort D . A . Russell at Cheyenne , Wyoming . In June 1875 he was ordered east , and given short tours of duty at Fort McHenry , Maryland , and at Fort Hamilton , New York . In November 1875 he was sent to Fort Ontario , New York , which was his station until May 1878 . While at this station he was detailed , in 1877 , to duty incident to labor disturbances in Pennsylvania , and sustained an injury which incapacitated him to a remarkable extent for two years . Short terms of duty at Charleston , South Carolina , and Fort McPherson , Georgia , interspersed with sick leaves brought him to the summer of 1882 , when in June he was ordered to duty with the attending surgeon in Washington , D . C . In November 1884 he himself became the attending surgeon , which post he held until November 1889 . In this capacity his attractive personality and his professional skill made him a prominent figure in the capital . He was made the attending physician to the White House by President Grover Cleveland , with whom he was on terms of intimate friendship and who brought him back to Washington during his second term in the presidency . From June to September 1888 he attended General Philip Sheridan during his last illness at Nonquitt , Massachusetts . From Washington he was ordered to Fort Logan , Colorado , where he served from May 1890 to February 1893 when he was again detailed as attending surgeon at the capital . Spanish - American War . In April 1897 he was assigned to duty at Fort Wayne , Michigan , and from this post he accompanied the troops into the field at the onset of the Spanish - American War . Arriving at Mobile , Alabama , he was assigned as chief surgeon of the First Independent Division commanded by Major General John J . Coppinger . He was later chief surgeon of the 4th Army Corps and still later chief surgeon on the staff of Major General James F . Wade in Havana . The medical department ship " Bay State " was placed at his disposal and he was sent to Jamaica for the purpose of acquiring information relative to the experience of the British Army in tropical hygiene . He made a study of the housing , food , clothing , and care of troops and submitted a report with recommendations on these subjects which were of material value . Returning from Cuba in November 1899 he commanded Josiah Simpson Hospital at Fortress Monroe , Virginia , and later was transferred to the headquarters of the Department of California at San Francisco as chief surgeon . In the passing years he had been rising in the military scale . Promoted to captain on May 14 , 1870 , to major on November 1 , 1886 , and to lieutenant colonel on February 21 , 1900 , he reached the grade of colonel on February 14 , 1902 . Surgeon General of the Army . At the time of Surgeon General William H . Forwood ' s retirement in September 1902 there was a regulation in effect that the appointment to Surgeon General should be for a period of four years , and a ruling that the appointee must have four years to serve before his compulsory retirement for age . There was a small group of brilliant officers on the list ahead of Colonel O ' Reilly , notably Colonels Smart , Lippincott , and DeWitt , but all were barred from the coveted place by lack of the necessary four years to serve . Colonel O ' Reilly , the senior officer able to meet the requirements , was appointed Surgeon General with the grade of brigadier general on September 7 , 1902 . Up to this time it had been the almost invariable custom that the office assistants of the Surgeon General should be selected from among the senior officers of the corps . General O ' Reilly departed from the long - time custom by surrounding himself with a group of young , alert , active men , a group that went far toward directing the fortunes of the corps for the next two decades . To this group belonged Jefferson R . Kean , Walter D . McCaw , Charles F . Mason , and James D . Glennan , all junior majors , and Merritte Webber Ireland , Francis T . Winter , Charles Lynch , and Carl R . Darnall who had still to gain that grade when O ' Reilly ' s term began . Kean was made executive officer and the others assigned to the charge of divisions into which the office was organized . Unsatisfactory conditions in the army disclosed by the Spanish - American War caused the appointment by President William McKinley of the Dodge Commission . The findings of this commission relating to the medical department took the form of a number of recommendations which it devolved upon O ' Reilly to carry out . These recommendations were briefly as follows : ( 1 ) a larger force of commissioned medical officers , ( 2 ) authority to establish in time of peace a proper volunteer hospital corps , ( 3 ) a nurse corps of selected trained women nurses ready to serve whenever necessity should arise , ( 4 ) a year ' s supply , for an army of at least four times the normal strength , of all medicines , hospital furniture , and stores as are not materially damaged by keeping , to be held constantly on hand in the medical supply depots , ( 5 ) charge of transportation to such in extent as will secure prompt shipment and ready delivery of all medical supplies , ( 6 ) simplification of administrative paper work , ( 7 ) provision for purchase by subsistence funds of articles of special diets for the sick . In his last annual report , that of 1908 , O ' Reilly was able to say that all of these objectives had been realized or were in good prospect of realization . O ' Reilly and his staff achieved a relation with the army , with Congress , with the medical profession , and with the public never visualized by any previous administration . During his term every medical department activity was studied , overhauled , and improved . Toward the latter part of his term an appropriation was obtained from Congress for the purchase of the site and for the beginning of construction of a general hospital in Washington — Walter Reed General Hospital — a project under advisement since the days of General Hammond . Accomplishments . Perhaps the outstanding accomplishment of this regime was the increase and reorganization of the Medical Corps and the Hospital Corps , with the elimination of the meaningless titles carried by medical officers and the substitution of the titles sergeant and corporal for the obsolete titles of noncommissioned officers . This reorganization act of April 23 , 1908 ( 35 Stat . 66 ) , also created the Medical Reserve Corps . O ' Reilly was president of the board which recommended the adoption of typhoid prophylaxis for the army . In 1906 he reconstituted the Board for the Study of Tropical Diseases in Manila and set for it certain objectives . In that same year he represented the United States at the international conference at Geneva , Switzerland , for the revision of the Geneva Convention . At the expiration of his first term of appointment in 1906 he was reappointed and served until the time for his compulsory retirement for age on January 14 , 1909 . Never of strong constitution and the subject of much ill health during his army career , his remaining three years were spent quietly in a state of semi - invalidism in Washington , where he died of uremic poisoning , on November 3 , 1912 . O ' Reilly ' s only notable written contribution was the monograph on military surgery which appeared in the fourth edition of W . W . Keen ' s " American Textbook of Surgery " ( 1903 ) , in which he collaborated with Major William C . Borden . O ' Reilly was a man of fine mind and of high culture . He had great personal attraction , winning the affection and loyalty of all with whom he came into intimate contact . Though of a sensitive and retiring disposition he had an unfailing fund of courtesy and good nature . He was a devotee of chamber music and an accomplished performer on the violin . Many of his deepest friendships were with those to whom he was bound by the ties of music . Physically a small man , he carried himself with a good military bearing . A convalescent hospital ship in service during World War I was named after him . Personal life . He was married on August 6 , 1877 , to Frances L . Pardee of Oswego , New York , who , with one daughter , survived him . His only son predeceased him . References . " This article includes text from the website Office of Medical History , which as a work of the United States federal government , is in the public domain . The entry can be found here . "