He was the first American physician to devote himself entirely to neurology, the author of the first American treatise about neurology, and one of the founders of the American Neurological Association.[2][3][4]
When the American Civil War broke out Hammond spent some time at the Baltimore infirmary[11] then joined the army (without recognition of his past service) on 28 May 1861, a month a half after the beginning of the hostilities. Surgeon General Clement Finley soon transferred him to West Virginia under the command of General William Starke Rosecrans command "to lessen his visibility".[12] There Hammond met Jonathan Letterman. Hammond worked with Letterman and Rosecrans on the design of a new ambulance wagon.
The atmosphere in the upper levels of medical services was then one of internal strife and personal conflicts. Hammond—a tall and imposing young man[13]—was no man of intrigue, nor even, according to all accounts, a very flexible person. However, the situation offered him the possibility for advancement. When Finley, the 10th Surgeon General, was fired after an argument with Secretary of WarEdwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln, against Stanton's advice and the normal rules of promotion,[12][14] named the 34-year-old Hammond to succeed him with the rank of brigadier general. Hammond became Surgeon General of the Army on 25 April 1862, less than a year after rejoining the army.
Surgeon General
Hammond launched a number of reforms.[15] He raised the requirements for admission into the Army Medical Corps.[16] The number of hospitals was greatly increased and he paid close attention to ventilation[17] He created Satterlee Hospital (which had up to 4,500 beds in hundreds of tents).[18] Hospitals were ordered to maintain much more complete records. In Washington he founded the National Museum of Health and Medicine (then called Army Medical Museum)[19] and put John H. Brinton in charge.[20] Hammond proposed a permanent military medical corps, a permanent hospital for the military, and centralized issuance of medications.[21] He recommended that "the service age of recruits be fixed by law at twenty years".[16] He successfully transferred the responsibility for sanitary trains from private companies to the government and personally oversaw the building of the wagons. He promoted Letterman and supported his reforms on the front.[22] On his initiative, Letterman's ambulance system was thoroughly tested before being extended to the whole Union.[23][24] Mortality decreased significantly. Efficiency increased, as Hammond promoted people on the basis of competence, not rank or connections, and his initiatives were positive and timely.[25]
Removal from office
On 4 May 1863 Hammond banned the mercury compound calomel from army supplies, as he believed it to be neither safe nor effective (he was later proved correct). He thought it dangerous to make an already debilitated patient vomit.[2][26] A "Calomel Rebellion" ensued,[27] as many of his colleagues had no alternative treatments and resented the move as an infringement on their liberty of practice. Hammond's arrogant nature did not help him solve the problem,[28] and his relations with Secretary of War Stanton became strained. On 3 September 1863 he was sent on a protracted "inspection tour" to the South,[29] which effectively removed him from office. Joseph Barnes, a friend of Stanton's and his personal physician, became acting Surgeon General.[30]
Hammond demanded to be either reinstated or court-martialed. A court-martial found him guilty of "irregularities" in the purchase of medical furniture (Stanton "used false data").[31][32] Hammond was dismissed on 18 August 1864.[10][29]
Neurology
With the help of friends Hammond established himself in New York City.[33] He became professor of nervous and mental diseases at Bellevue Hospital in 1867 and at the New York University in 1874. He served on the faculty of the University of Vermont at Burlington[34] and was co-founder and faculty member of the Post Graduate Medical School of New York.[10] In the 1870s, he limited his practice to possible cases of nervous or mental diseases, the first American physician to do so.[2] He conducted early experiments on the use of lithium for the treatment of mania.[35]
In 1871 he published his best-known work, Treatise on diseases of the nervous system.[36] In early 1872 he traveled to California to visit his ailing friend Letterman.[37][38] In 1874 he founded, with Silas Weir Mitchell and many others, the American Neurological Association.[39] In 1878 "he was restored to the army [...] with the grade of brigadier general, without pay or allowances".[10][40]
Hammond was the author of many books and articles,[41] some of them published in a journal he had founded.[42] He was energetic, sceptical,[43] moderate,[44] a believer in freedom,[45] and a reformer. He enjoyed writing in his spare time, becoming a science journalist and a naturalist. He also wrote a short biography of Polydore Vergil.
In 1882 he wrote an account of transgender cultural practices among the Pueblo peoples, becoming an early American writer to broach the subject.[46]
In 1888 he returned to Washington, where he founded a hospital[47] for patients with nervous and mental diseases.[3]
He died in Washington on 5 January 1900 of heart failure and was buried with military honors at the Arlington National Cemetery.
Hammond was married twice. On 3 July 1849, the day following his first commission as an assistant surgeon, he married Helen Nisbet. They had five children, two of whom died in infancy.[48] His second spouse was Esther Dyer (d. 1925), who is buried by his side. His son Graeme Hammond also was a neurologist, as well as an Olympic fencer. Hammond co-authored a novel with his daughter, the novelist Clara Lanza.
Skepticism
Hammond was a scientific skeptic. He was a critic of spiritualism and attributed mediumship to suggestion and sleight of hand tricks. He explained the behavior of mediums as symptoms of hypnosis, hysteria, catalepsy and ecstasy. His book The Physics and Physiology of Spiritualism (1871)[49] is an early text on anomalistic psychology and was revised into a larger edition Spiritualism and Allied Causes and Conditions of Nervous Derangement (1876).[50] Hammond also argued that Spiritualism was itself a form of mental illness.[51] His book, Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology (1879) is still referenced today as a historical example of a skeptical examination of the paranormal claims of fasting girls.[52] In some cases, the fasting girls exhibited the appearance of stigmata. Hammond ascribed the phenomenon to fraud and hysteria on the part of the girl.[53]
(1857) Experimental research relative to the nutritive value and physiological effects of albumen starch and gum, when singly and exclusively used as a food
(1861) On uraemic intoxication
(1863) Treatise on hygiene, with special reference to the military service (Surgeon General Hammond found no satisfying manual on hygiene. He wrote one. For some reason Hammond toned down a clearly racist passage in a last-minute note, adding it was premature to reserve military valor to the whites. Freemon 2001p. 163 at Google Books)
(1879a) "The non-asylum treatment of the insane". Neurological contributions, p. 1, at Google Books1 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1879 (The insane should not automatically be sent to an asylum. A general practitioner is perfectly capable of handling many cases.)
(1899) "The American soldier and venereal diseases: A refutation of some of the statements of Mr. Edward Atkinson". NY Med. Jour.70 (Atkinson, an anti-imperialist activist, had written on the situation of American soldiers in the Philippines[56]).
"Introduction". Polydori Virgilii De rerum inventoribus. Agathynian Club: v–xvi. 1868. (in English) (Hammond wrote this short biography of Polydore Vergil in 1867)
Hammond's disease, a form of athetosis, was first described by Hammond (in the Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System) and now bears his name. He also coined the word "athetosis".[57][58]
^He was a tall man (1.88 meter, 6'2", which was rare at the time), weighed up to 250 pounds and kept his military bearing all his life.
^"[Hammond had] served under two men, Charles Tripler and Jonathan Lettermen, [sic] who were sufficiently impressed with his abilities to serve later as his subordinates without apparent objection." Gillett, Mary C. (1987). The Army Medical Department, 1818–1865. Army Historical Series, Center for Military History Publication. Government Printing Office. Not all were like Letterman and Tripler.
^See the account given in U.S. Army Medical Department. (Last Modified May 16, 2009) "Part 6Archived 2008-02-08 at the Wayback Machine". The Evolution of Preventive Medicine in the United States Army, 1607–1939, especially from p. 104
^Reinarz, Jonathan (December 2005). "The age of museum medicine: the rise and fall of the medical museum at Birmingham's School of Medicine". Social History of Medicine. 18 (3): 419–37. doi:10.1093/shm/hki050. [Medical museums] were central to instruction at medical schools during the nineteenth century
^"The ambulance corps was eventually taken from the quartermasters and placed under medical authority, but only after Hammond had accused [Stanton] of a disregard of the comfort of the wounded." Freemon 2001William A. Hammond, p. 142, at Google Books
^"There are numerous instances where positive orders were given not to buy of particular houses, whose prices, or the quality or measure of whose goods was found objectionable". Circular in behalf of the surgeon-general, 1863 , p. 11, at Google Books. American Medical Times8 (1864-01-02), p. 11
^For a short and lively account of this episode: Jose Llinas, "Only victim of the Calomel Rebellion". Gainesville Sun. 5 June 1987, p. 11. Or this excerpt from Steve Herman's book: Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Cohen: Call Sign Band-Aid Six. William A. Hammond at Google Books
^An assistant-surgeon who had seen Hammond inspect his hospital described him as "arrogant and pompous". Freemon, who recounts the incident (Freemon 2001p. 143 at Google Books), also points to an occasion when Hammond could say: "I was then an assistant surgeon of the army, and rather more puffed up than I am now". (Hammond, Our friends who have passed away)
^Hammond, A Treatise on diseases of the nervous system, p. 381, at Google Books, p. 381 : "I have used the bromide of lithium in cases of acute mania[...] The doses should be large[...]" Comment in a bulletin of the WHO, p. 516 : "it is difficult to determine in retrospect whether it was the lithium or the bromide that was the critical agent."
^The list of his articles in scientific journals given by Blustein 1991, p. 271 at Google Books extends over nine pages with more than twenty articles per page (translations included)
^Quarterly journal of psychological medicine and medical jurisprudence
^Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Hammond", p. 115).
^Hammond and Xantus de Vesey were not the only "surgeons-ornithologists": Hume, Edgar Erskine. Ornithologists of the United States Army Medical Corps: Thirty-six biographies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1942. 583 p.
References
Blustein, Bonnie Ellen (1991). Preserve your love for science: Life of William A. Hammond, American neurologist. New York: Cambridge University Press. Preview at Google Books. Includes an extensive list of works. See also Notes on sources, p. 266
Freemon, Frank R. (2001). Gangrene and glory: Medical care during the American Civil War — Medical care during the American Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN978-0-252-07010-5. Preview at Google Books
Phalen, James M. (April 1940). "William Alexander Hammond". Army Medical Bulletin. Chiefs of the Medical Department, U.S. Army 1775–1940. Biographical Sketches (52): 42–46. Retrieved 2012-04-13.
Pilcher, James Evelyn, "XI. Brigadier general William Alexander Hammond, surgeon general of the United States Army, 1862–1864", in The surgeon generals of the army of the United States of America; a series of biographical sketches of the senior officers of the military medical service from the American revolution to the Philippine pacification, Carlisle. Pa., The Association of military surgeons, 1905, vi+114 pages. Mainly based on an account by General Smith, a friend and assistant of Hammond
