THE MILITARY SURGEON AND THE CIVILIAN 
PRACTITIONER 
By Col. W. B. Banister 
Medical Corps, United States Army 
Mr. President and Gentlemen: When the President of this 
Society extended an invitation to the military surgeons of the 
Philippine Department to participate in its proceedings this 
year I was gratified, as I have long felt that the civilian practi- 
tioner and the military surgeon should be brought into closer 
touch and sympathy, and each acquire a more intimate knowledge 
of the particular line of development of the other, to our mutual 
advantage. I know of no better method of establishing a line 
of contact than the exchange of ideas in a general meeting of 
the medical profession of these Islands, such as this. 
These introductory remarks would lead to the inference that 
the civilian practitioner and the military surgeon have developed 
along different lines and, while I admit that their respective 
development presents many points of contact, I also claim it 
presents some lines of cleavage as well. The military surgeon 
has advanced particularly along the line of the etiology of disease 
with special reference to its bearing on preventive medicine, and 
the civilian practitioner in the direction of therapeutics, or the 
curative treatment of disease. This difference has arisen from 
the character of the responsibilities resting upon each, respec- 
tively. The senior surgeon of a military command is held offi- 
cially responsible for the occurrence of epidemics in armies, and 
for not stamping out such epidemics when they begin, and at 
least must show that all the scientific knowledge of his day has 
been utilized, and if that is not sufficient he is expected to get 
more scientific knowledge. The principle involved is to get as 
many bayonets as possible to the battlefield; and, however fine 
the curative treatment may be, a sick soldier cannot fight, and 
so becomes a liability rather than an asset. Soldiers are asso- 
ciated together so intimately and in such numbers that armies 
are peculiarly susceptible to epidemic diseases, and many armies 
have been defeated by disease rather than by the efforts of their 
enemies. Brennus undoubtedly would have taken the Capitol 
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