Desgenettes’ death occurred in 1837. He made no contributions to medical literature; and his enemies brought against him the charge that, when he delivered a lecture, he spoiled it by telling too many anecdotes about the different wars in which he took part.
Jean-Dominique Larrey was born in 1776 at Baudéan, a French village at the foot of the Pyrenees. At the age of thirteen years, shortly after the death of his father, he quitted his native village and came under the care of his uncle, Alexis Larrey, who was Surgeon-Major and Professor at the Hospital of Grave, near Toulouse. Under the wise and kindly guidance of the latter he pursued his studies so earnestly and with such intelligence that he was able, on attaining his twentieth year, to pass successfully the examinations required for an appointment to the position of Assistant Surgeon in the French Navy.
The sloop-of-war “La Vigilante,” the vessel in which he gained his first experience in the naval service, met with disaster and Larrey was nearly shipwrecked. As soon as possible after this thrilling experience he went to Paris and took service in the great Hospital of Hôtel-Dieu, under the orders of the famous surgeon Desault. This was at the beginning of the severe winter of 1789, an eventful time in the history of France. The Revolution was now in full swing, and Larrey not only was an eye-witness of the troubles which characterized its early stages, but he also had the opportunity, under the orders of Desault, to render professional service to the first victims of those tragic days. Three years afterward, while serving in the Army of the Rhine, under the command of Marshal Luckner, he was able to put to good use all the admirable surgical training which he had received under Desault at the Hôtel-Dieu.
When Larrey was about twenty-one years old and while he was attached to that part of the French Army which was then stationed in the vicinity of Milan and Venice, he interested himself actively in the establishment of an army ambulance service. Already three or four years earlier he had become sensible of the inconveniences of the French ambulances which were then in use. In the first place, these vehicles were of such a type as to be ill-suited to the work which they were intended to perform; they were too heavy to be driven with reasonable speed to and from the battlefield, and they were also so rigidly constructed that at every irregularity in the ground over which the wheels passed the wounded soldier experienced a painful jolt. Then, in the second place, aside from the faulty construction of these vehicles, the regulations governing their management were so badly planned as to leave the wounded lying unaided on the battlefield sometimes for several hours together. It was customary, for example, to station the ambulances at a spot about three miles distant from the troops who were shortly to engage in combat, and they were not despatched to the battlefield until after the fighting had ended. In this way hours often elapsed before the wounded could receive any aid whatever from the surgeon.
In working out a solution of this complex problem Larrey’s very practical mind quickly reached certain conclusions: first, that it was most important to remove the wounded from the battlefield to a place of safety much earlier than had hitherto been the custom; and, second, that the type of ambulance then universally employed was altogether too heavy and too rigid to serve well the purposes for which it was needed. He realized fully that this last part of the problem was the more important part, and that, if he could invent a less ponderous and at the same time more elastic vehicle for use as the field ambulance, he would by this very act be placed in a position where he could effect in a large measure a solution of the second half of the problem.
BARON LARREY
Larrey promptly set about the work of providing a new type of field ambulance and in a short time was successful in obtaining a most useful vehicle for the purpose. It is described by his biographer in the following words:—
This invention of Larrey’s was a kind of carriage hung on springs, uniting great strength and solidity with lightness. Such indeed was its lightness that it was able to follow all the movements of the advance guard with as much speed as flying artillery. These ambulances volantes, as they were called, were first used by the French in a defile of the Rhine near Koenigstein. Here the ambulances invented by the talented and benevolent French surgeon bore the wounded rapidly away from the neighborhood of the enemy instead of leaving them either to die or to sustain a protracted agony on the field of battle.