Girard Med Center history

Attracted by the opportunity for military service in the Civil War he came to the United States and was appointed an acting assistant surgeon in the Union army on January 19, 1865.

He was serving at Charleston, S. C. when on May 14, 1867, he was commissioned as an assistant surgeon in the medical corps.

In December 1872 he went from Brownville to New York by boat and after short tours at Fort Pulaski, Ga., and Yorkville, S. C., he went to the United States Military Academy at West Point where he was stationed for the next three years.

In 1893 he was a delegate to the meeting of the American Medical Association at Milwaukee.

He made a study of the effects of bullets from the new small calibre rifles and presented a report to the Washington meeting in 1894 of the Association of Military Surgeons, of which he was one of the earliest members.

He served at Fort Douglas, Utah, from November 1895 until the onset of the Spanish-American War, which found him in Madrid, Spain, as a delegate to the Ninth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography.

The Behavioral Wellness Center at Girard began its life as the Philadelphia Children’s Homeopathic Hospital established in 1896, and later moved to 8th and Franklin where it was renamed St Luke’s and Children’s Medical Center.

He was promoted to the grade of brigadier general on April 6, 1905, and was retired the following day at his own request.

The socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, published by J.A. Wayland, perhaps the largest circulated weekly newspaper in the world at its peak in 1913 was published in Girard Kansas and mentioned in the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

(Military Surgeon, March 1914, Pacific Med.