Vietnam war hospital conditions series#

In Alan Alda’s memorable performances, there was always a healthy dose of Groucho Marx thrown in to carry off more than a decade of terrific one-liners mixed with the character’s heartfelt empathy for his patients. There are, of course many similarities to Hornberger’s novel to the film and television show, but none more critical to the success of all three than the sarcastic surgeon with the heart of gold, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce.

George Miller selects human blood for a patient at the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital at Kunu-ri, Korea.

Ironically, for all the money the television show made for its producers, writers, developers, actors and the CBS Television Network, Hornberger sold the rights for a ridiculously low amount and only earned $500 per episode (the equivalent of a few thousand dollars today). After the war, he returned to his native Maine and practiced as a thoracic surgeon there. It took another five years before he finally secured a publisher, William Morrow and Company. It took Hornberger more than a decade to write his novel, an act that helped him deal with the trauma he saw and experienced in Korea. The surgeons at the 8055th flouted such rules because they felt that to not repair such injuries, and prevent needless amputations of countless limbs, would be to disobey their Hippocratic Oath, something they may have seen as a far more important bond than the one they took upon induction into the military. This was still a relatively new procedure, time-consuming, and then forbidden by the U.S. Hornberger, who created Hawkeye to represent his own audacious surgical exploits, pioneered the use of arterial repairs on the front lines of war. The 8055th was one of 10 fully-functioning mobile hospitals operating during the Korean War. Army, and assigned to the 8055th MASH, which traveled along the 38th parallel, the now infamous demilitarized zone dividing the Korean peninsula into North and South Korea. Hornberger was drafted out of his surgical internship, inducted into the U.S.

Vietnam war hospital conditions series#

Wilcox was one in the inspirations for Richard Hooker’s novel “MASH,” as well as the subsequent film and tv series ‘Richard Hooker’ was a pseudonym for military surgeon H. (In the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” the fictional 4077th does move to a different location but only rarely did so in previous episodes).Īmerican military surgeons Richard Warren (1926-2009) and Roger Wilcox (1923-2006) pose beside the sign outside the 8063rd MASH (Mobile Army Surgery Hospital) camp headquarters, in South Korea, April 1952. The key word, of course, was mobile and they moved from location to location on, at least, a monthly basis. Tent-based, the people in MASH units worked long hours and endured horrific stresses of warfare. MASH units of the Korean War were located close enough to the front that wounded soldiers might be more expeditiously treated, but were distant enough so that the surgeons, nurses, and other personnel would not be exposed to direct combat. They called it triage, from the French word trier, which means to sort out. In the midst of battle, these doctors were forced to develop a system of setting priorities in their gory duties. Some were mortally wounded, others just needed to be patched up and sent back into the fray. These units were based on a concept dating back to the Napoleonic wars, when doctors struggled to save the lives of soldiers wasted by cannons, muskets, buckshot, and shrapnel. They were initially called Auxiliary Surgical Groups and were an attempt to move surgical care closer to wounded soldiers than the fixed-in-place field hospitals then in existence. The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, concept was first deployed by the U.S. Richard Hornberger, who wrote under the pen name of Richard Hooker. The hit television show was loosely based on the 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name and even more loosely on a 1968 novel, “M*A*S*H: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” by former U.S. The people in MASH units worked long hours and endured horrific stresses of warfare.