The Invention of the Ambulance

[A] Before the end of the eighteenth century a soldier wounded in a battle waited until the battle was over. [B] The carts that would carry him were held well to the rear, out of danger and out of use, and a man with an injury that could have been treated in an hour was commonly reached on the following day. [C] The surgeon who changed this did not invent a new treatment or a new instrument. He moved the carts forward. [D]

Light vehicles were built to keep up with the army, staffed with surgeons and stretcher-bearers, and sent into the field while the fighting continued. With them came a second idea that proved harder to accept. Men were to be treated in the order their injuries required and not in the order of their rank, and the enemy wounded were to be treated on the same terms as one's own. Officers objected, and the objection was not foolish: the system took from them a privilege that everything else in military life confirmed. What settled the argument was that the new arrangement returned soldiers to their units, and an army that recovered its wounded was larger the following month than one that did not.