Forward Surgery and Combat Hospitals: The Origins of the MASH

Abstract

The U.S. Army adopted forward surgical hospitals (SHs) during World War I on the advice of the British and French armies. The purposes were not just to save lives, but to benefit the military by returning more patients to duty and reducing the size of the hospital system through fewer infections and shorter hospital stays. The Army examined the utility of the units at the end of the war and retained them for any future conflicts, but opposition also survived. The question was the utility for the Army: was it worth making a substantial investment, and reducing care for other wounded soldiers, for the most grievously wounded, perhaps 1 percent of the total? Devising an effective way to organize forward SHs was a problem in the interwar years and early in World War II (WWII). But from the late 1930s, the Army never reexamined whether it should provide forward surgery, only how to do so, including pushing surgeons even further forward on the battlefield. At the end of WWII, the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) was created to perform the mission, although the MASH was only the latest format.