Leonard Wood, William Muldoon and the Medical Profession: Public Health and Universal Military Training

Abstract

T TNIVERSAL military training was the major goal of the J military preparedness movement in the World War I era. General Leonard Wood (1860-1927), heading pressure groups for preparedness legislation and a model training camp at Plattsburg Barracks, New York, was the major spokesman for this measure. This soldier, prophet, and preacher fused his military and backgrounds into a moral perspective transcending the technical concerns of most professional army officers or doctors. A Massachusetts native, and a Harvard-trained physician, Wood believed that military discipline would develop citizens morally, physically, and politically. Thus, along with Dr. Harvey Gushing, Boston's celebrated neurosurgeon, and other representatives of the medical mind of New England, Wood felt that universal military training was a public-health project in an old, broad sense of the term.l Before most physicians and public-health workers came to rely on surgical and pharmaceutical cures, a regulated life was seen as the key to health. By the turn of the twentieth century, as practice grew less concerned with regimen, the movement for universal military training came to represent such a view. This essay on the relationship between military training and the healing arts focuses on the transition of the therapy of regimen from social medicine into the armed forces. It delineates this process by investigating Leonard Wood's rationale for army induction, and the support it received from the community in general and