ndersen er an - Gundersen Health System

Authors:
Jeffrey S. Sartin, MD
Section of Infectious Disease
Department of Internal Medicine
Gundersen Lutheran Health System
La Crosse, Wisconsin
Douglas Lanska, MD, MS, MSPH,
FAAN
Veterans Affairs Medical Center
Great Lakes Healthcare System
Tomah, Wisconsin
Professor of Neurology
University of Wisconsin School of
Medicine and Public Health
Madison, Wisconsin
Surgeon General William A. Hammond
(1828-1900):
Successes and Failures of Medical Leadership
Abstract
A controversial character in his day, William A. Hammond made a number of lasting
contributions to the medical profession in the second half of the 19th century. Here we
recount the highlights and the lowlights of Hammond’s long and lively career.
Address for correspondence:
Jeffrey S. Sartin, MD
Mail Stop C02-007
Gundersen Lutheran Health System
1900 South Avenue
La Crosse, WI 54601
Telephone: (608) 782-7300
Fax: (608) 775-5542
email: jssartin@gundluth.org
Having rushed up the stairs of his Washington home
with characteristic alacrity, on January 5, 1900,
William Alexander Hammond, MD, collapsed with an acute
coronary occlusion that would soon prove fatal. Thus ended the
life of a remarkable physician and man of science, whose long
career spanned the transition of medicine from a relatively crude
and ineffective empiricism to a profession based on scientific
principles. He is best remembered today as the unfortunate victim
of Washington politics, being the only Army Surgeon General to
suffer the indignity of a court-martial and removal from office in
1863. Nevertheless, he had an illustrious career as a seminal figure in
American neurology, and his innovative organizational leadership
produced new military and civilian specialty hospitals, significant
improvements in military medical care, a ground-breaking history
of medical care during the Civil War, and various other institutions
and professional medical organizations.
Hammond’s leadership successes were balanced by significant
failures, and more than a century after his death his legacy remains
complicated and controversial. Hammond was indeed a colorful
and complex character with both considerable attributes and
faults: a brilliant organizer and administrator, and an outstanding
teacher and apostle of neurology, but at best a mediocre if prolific
scholar. More problematically, he came across as an audacious,
contentious, boastful, and arrogant individual 1 with “a voice so
powerful that it could be heard up-wind in a hurricane.” 2 In his
appetites and endeavors Hammond symbolized the best and worst
of American culture as it barreled through the latter half of the
19th century.
Early Career
William Hammond was born on August 28, 1828, in Annapolis,
Maryland, and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By the age of
20 he had completed his medical training at the University of the
City of New York. In July 1848 he married his first wife, Helen
Nisbet, and began his service in the Army in the distant post of
New Mexico Territory. His various postings throughout the West
afforded him a steady income for his burgeoning family, soon to
include 3 children, as well as the opportunity to learn medicine
and engage in scientific inquiries in an arena far removed from the
constraints of the eastern medical establishment. 3
He approached his work with precision and imagination, and
his reputation as a medical officer in the Army and as a scientific
investigator blossomed throughout the 1850s. He had at least 24
publications on various topics — particularly nutrition, physiology,
and toxicology — during that decade. His military service was
interrupted for a while in 1852, as he manifested the first signs
of the peculiar and disabling cardiac condition that would trouble
him intermittently for the next 8 years. In 1857 he won the
American Medical Association’s essay prize for his entry on “The
Nutritive Value and Physiological Effects of Albumen, Starch,
and Gum,” based on experiments and observations with himself
as the test subject. 4 Toward the end of his early Army career in
1858 he spent an extended medical leave in Philadelphia, where
he collaborated with other young physicians, including Silas Weir
Mitchell (1829-1914), in establishing an elite research society,
the Philadelphia Biological Society. His association with Mitchell
would later bear fruit in the advancement of the field of neurology
Gundersen Lutheran Medical Journal • Volume 5, Number 1, July 2008 21