During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, British doctors travelled in unprecedented numbers to foreign and often exotic locations where they were confronted with battlefield injuries, virulent and mysterious diseases and complex military politics that few had encountered before. These experiences changed the way they viewed their profession, the nature of disease and the types of treatment that were effective. This book makes a departure from histories which depict their work as bloody, violent and futile, to examine instead how nearly twenty five years of sustained warfare affected the professional identity embraced by those doctors and thoroughly militarized their approach to medicine. I argue that the philosophy they came to embrace – that military medicine was a specialized field – was not only important to the practice of medicine within the British army, but also had significant implications for the development of medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.

Throughout the following chapters a handful of senior medical officers feature prominently as their influence on the development of military medicine is traced through their participation in campaign after campaign from 1793 to 1815. These men headed a department which expanded tenfold over the course of the Wars, providing vital opportunities for experiment and implementation of new ideas. It housed a large pool of medical recruits eager to learn and get ahead. In 1789, 152 medical officers were serving with the department; by 1814 this number had risen to 1,274. Over the entire period, 2,834 medical officers were recruited.