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William Crawford Gorgas was the Surgeon General of the Army who was responsible for making decisions about military medicine during World War I. He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, which saw costly medical mistakes that Gorgas was eager to avoid repeating. Gorgas recognized that cramped army camps were fertile grounds for epidemics, so he created isolated areas for treating infectious diseases. Though Gorgas advocated fiercely for more resources to combat infectious diseases in army camps, many of his superiors ignored his advice, and he ultimately was not able to stop the horrific spread of the 1918 influenza epidemic at army bases.
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William Crawford Gorgas Character Timeline in The Great Influenza
The timeline below shows where the character William Crawford Gorgas appears in The Great Influenza. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 10
...century), had proven this. For the upcoming war, Surgeon General of the Army William Crawford Gorgas would be the one responsible for making decisions about military medicine. As a Spanish-American War...
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...war, the U.S. military didn’t have nearly enough medical personnel, and it particularly lacked nurses. Gorgas tried to create a corps of “practical nurses” who were not fully educated and trained...
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Chapter 11
...of soldiers, and young men from around the country were packed together in close quarters. Gorgas feared what a mass epidemic could do. By this point, medical science had managed to...
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...rate of civilians. Wilson’s Republican rivals used the measles fiasco to attack him, and so Gorgas was forced to give testimony.
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Gorgas hoped his testimony would make the army devote more resources to protecting troops. In some...
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Chapter 13
Gorgas wrote to army hospital commanders in 1917 to inform them that pneumonia would likely be...
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Gorgas asked Welch to chair a board specifically dedicated to pneumonia. Welch called Flexner, and the...
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Gorgas, Welch, and Cole weren’t worried at first about influenza, although they were tracking outbreaks (which...
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Chapter 14
...and a small station in France, there were unusually high mortality rates. Welch, Cole, and Gorgas closely studied the epidemic’s progress abroad, looking for clues about what would happen next.
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Chapter 16
Gorgas ordered Welch, Cole, Victor Vaughan, and Fredrick Russell to go to Devens. They were shocked...
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Chapter 18
...Devens was a surprise, subsequent outbreaks at military bases were not a surprise. After Devens, Gorgas immediately warned other camps around the country.
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Chapter 25
...soon as Welch saw autopsies of victims at Camp Devens, he called a Harvard pathologist, Gorgas, and Avery at the Rockefeller Institute. Avery immediately went back to his lab and got...
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Chapter 26
...acknowledge the virus, because it was still so focused on war. This had consequences: when Gorgas raised a warning at Camp Devens that soldiers shouldn’t be transferred between camps to contain...
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Chapter 34
Gorgas went into World War I with the goal of making it the first war where...
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