The Army Medical Service as a career

In our advertisement columns this week there will be found an announcement which must be looked upon as, in Carlyle's phrase, “significant of much.” The Director-General of the Army Medical Service makes known to all whom it may concern that thirty commissions in the Royal Army Medical Corps are offered for competition to men possessing the necessary qualifications. It is a considerable time now since such an advertisement has been issued. In spite of the transformation of the Department into a Royal Corps, and the concession of real rank and corresponding military titles, the service had become so unpopular with the rising generation of the medical profession that the supply of candidates practically ceased. The causes of this unpopularity are too well known to readers of the BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL to need recapitulation. In the alienation of the medical profession from the service the War Office has only reaped what it had sown. And when wiser counsels began to prevail there came a “blind Fury” of hysterical denunciation and calumny which slit the thin-spun thread that already gave promise of drawing the profession and the army once more together. The charges were shown to be grossly exaggerated, and it was proved that the responsibility for such breakdown in the medical arrangements as did occur could not justly be laid on the shoulders of the Royal Army Medical Corps. But as Voltaire cynically said, “If dirt enough is thrown some of it will stick,” and it is not surprising that self-respecting men should not care to expose themselves to the eruption of “mud volcanoes” of slander.