ABSTRACT
To the average professional officer, the military doctor is an unwillingly tolerated non-combatant who takes sick call, gives cathartic pills, makes transportation troubles, complicates tactical plans, and causes the water to smell bad. Despite the fact that it was written over a hundred years ago, the broad and minutely detailed study, A History of the British Standing Army by Colonel C. Walton, continues to provide the best study to date of the hospital organization that accompanied King William III's armies to Ireland and Flanders. It would appear, therefore, that an up-to-date review of the story of the army medical services, particularly acute casualty-receiving hospitals, during the early formative years of the British Standing Army is overdue. A rudimentary contemporary understanding of waging international warfare, coupled with unfortunate delegation, resulted in hurried, ill-conceived and poorly co-ordinated planning. Even Parliament's domestic achievements in the field of military hospital support did not last.
