MILITARY MEDICAL ENTOMOLOGY
1865-1939: AN AWAKENING
Joe Conlon, AMCA Technical Advisor
ABSTRACT
An appreciation of sanitation’s force-multiplying
properties gained from the tremendous impact that filth-related disease exacted
on both sides during the Civil War gave rise to initiatives to codify military
sanitary regulations and their enforcement post-bellum. Despite this knowledge,
the nation’s armed forces were again caught ill-equipped to address
communicable disease, particularly within garrison facilities unable to meet
the needs of a rapidly mobilized army prior to and after the Spanish-American
War. Advances in epidemiology and vector biology made by military medical
personnel during the late 19th and early 20th century brought about a slow
organizational transformation to preventive medicine/sanitary units organic to
theatre assets that rapidly reduced disease morbidity in combat scenarios. The
yellow fever and malaria control successes in the Caribbean provided further
proof that elimination of vectors through source reduction, larviciding,
fumigation and exclusion could substantially reduce vector-borne disease where
these were practiced and supported by organized mosquito control units – both
civil and military. This was further abetted in WWI with the rise of a chemical
industry geared to provide explosives, poison munitions, and agricultural;
commodities to the war effort. This eventually spun off into the development
and use of chemical vector control methodologies applied by personnel assigned
to that task. After the armistice, work began to organize vector/pest control
assets within the army utilizing trained entomologists. The designation of
schools of public health in the United States after the war provided
entomologists specially trained in tropical medicine and vector-borne disease
that eventually formed a cadre of military entomologists comprising the
forerunners of those we have today.