statistical use. On 1 May 1918, he reported to Colonel Owen on his stay in London, with a separate memorandum covering each subject discussed, and proceeded on to France. 41[1]
Before Major Wilson's arrival in France, the then Chief Surgeon of the AEF, Brig. Gen. A. E. Bradley, had issued Circular No. 17, 2 April 1918, "Instruction Concerning Autopsies," in which the attention of medical officers was called to the importance of the post mortem examinations and under which Major Wilson was to build up the necropsy service in the AEF. The circular, issued in order to "secure proper records of causes of death of American troops in France, and specimens of scientific value for the Army Medical Museum," gave directions as to procedures in autopsies, which "should be performed whenever possible." With this encouragement to the adoption of the autopsy as a routine procedure, to be done as a matter of course in all cases rather than as a special procedure to be done only on express authorization, the number of autopsies performed in the AEF rose from less than 25 percent of all deaths in hospitals, which it had been in 1917, to 57 percent in the early months of 1918, and 92 percent in August and September. It held up to 85 percent even in the peak month of the influenza epidemic, October 1918, when the laboratory facilities and staffs, like every other hospital facility, were "overwhelmed by the enormous number of deaths from influenza and the battle casualties of the Argonne offensive." 42[2]
Necropsy Service in the AEF
Writing shortly after the event, Colonel Wilson pointed out that in May 1918 there were, in the AEF to serve 72 hospitals and laboratories, but "fifteen pathologists capable of making post-mortems and intelligently interpreting the results" — a condition due in part to the "long neglect of autopsies in many civil institutions in the United States" and in part to the "overshadowing status of bacteriology in military laboratories." He continued:
The autopsy service in the Army in the United States had not been established as a routine procedure, but, on the contrary, autopsies were made only on the written authority of the commanding officer of the hospital. However, in the A.E.F. the need of a routine autopsy service, amounting in fact to professional inspection of the diagnostic and thera-
- ↑ 41 Letter, Maj. L. B. Wilson to Col. W. O. Owen, 1 May 1918, with eleven memoranda attached. On file in historical records of AFIP.
- ↑ 42 (1) Wilson, L. B.: The Pathologic Service of the American Expeditionary Force. The Military Surgeon 45: 700, 702, December 1919. (2) Medical Department History, World War I, volume II, pp. 918-919.
