American Civil War US Army Surgeon and Medical Pioneer. Known as the "Father of Battlefield Medicine", he is credited as being the founder of modern methods and practices for medical organizations in military forces or battlefield medical management. The son of a surgeon, after graduating in 1845 from Jefferson College (now Washington and Jefferson College) at Washington, Pennsylvania, he attended Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University) at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1849. He then became an assistant surgeon in the US Army's Medical Department. After serving in Florida in the Seminole campaigns until 1853, he was stationed at Fort Ripley, Minnesota and then assigned to Fort Defiance, New Mexico Territory during the Apache campaign. Following a tour at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he was assigned to California, serving from 1860 until 1861. When the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, he served with the Union's Army of the Potomac and the following year he became medical director of the Union Army's Department of West Virginia. In June 1862 he was appointed medical director of the Army of the Potomac at the rank of major and set upon reorganizing the Union Army's Medical Service. He devised a system of forward first aid stations at the regimental level, where triage principles could be implemented. He also established standard operating procedures to accept and effectively treat war casualties, set up mobile field hospitals at division and corps headquarters along with an ambulance corps, and an efficient system for distributing medical supplies, all under the control of medical personnel instead of the Union Army's Quartermaster Department. This would prove to be beneficial at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia in December 1862. His system was eventually adopted by an Act of Congress in March 1864 as the official plan for handling and treating wounded soldiers. In December 1864 he resigned from the Union Army and moved to San Francisco, California where he published his memoirs, "Medical Recollections of the Army of the Potomac" (1866) and served as a coroner from 1867 until 1872. Following the death of his wife, he became depressed which led to several illnesses, and he died in San Francisco at the age of 47.