It may be that every company was suppsoed to have its own physician, I don't know. Don't believe i have heard that to be honest. But I would guess that if so, it was at best on paper. At the Battle of Little Bighorn, the whole regiment had 3 surgeons/medical officers/not sure what to call them. I have not heard mention of anthing like our times' medics.
All the best,
Noggy
Apparently the reduction of the budget allocated to the Army after the Civil War let to a severe deterioration of the quantity and quality of the medical service, too. There might at times be no army surgeon available at all for a whole post.
Excerpt from a master thesis titled
AN ANALYSIS OF THE HEALTH SERVICE SUPPORT TO THE CENTENNIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1876:
To illustrate the challenge of medical staffing on the frontier in 1876, there were
200 permanent and temporary posts that needed medical personnel. That same year and,
ironically, on the second day of the Battle of Little Big Horn, Congress passed an act
reducing the number of Assistant Surgeon authorizations from 150 to 125. When the
campaign began, the Army Medical Department was unable to source 25 percent of its
requirements across the frontier. When the act passed, the resources dwindled even
further. This reduction hampered the Centennial Campaign as well.
When units conducted expeditions in the field, frontier post surgeons sometimes
left their post to accompany units that had no other medical support. This left a void. To
remedy these situations, the Surgeon General often relied on frontier surgeons who
practiced near the posts to provide care for those personnel on a pay-by-the-visit basis.7
This practice allowed sufficient medical support for the posts, but units conducting
operations in the field did not always have this type of augmentation or reach back
capability. The absence of qualified assisting surgeons or contract surgeons often resulted
in acting surgeons constrained to the immediate vicinity of unit headquarters.
Dr. Paulding, in a letter to his mother from camp at Fort Pease on April 24, 1876, stated,
“Gibbon doesn’t want me to go after deer or buffalo . . . if I should get shot they wouldn’t
have a doctor and might want one.” The appointment of a non-qualified line officer as
surgeon or the refusal of his commander to hire a contract surgeon did not improve
Paulding’s predicament.
Contract surgeons participated in the campaign but not without their own unique
risks. The practice of hiring surgeons worked well during the Civil War, but the years
preceding 1876 saw proportional reductions in correlation to Army Medical Department
cuts. Author Joan Stevenson noted: “Numbers of these hired surgeons continued to drop
sharply, from 2,000 in 1865 to 262 in 1866, 187 in 1870 and finally to a quota of only 75
in 1874.”9 The reductions existed primarily due to funding constraints and not because of
contract surgeon incompetence. As occurred in the Civil War, contract surgeons in 1876
were exempt from entrance exams and competence assessment boards. The boards still
existed, however, but the Army hired contract surgeons to compensate for the low pass
rate of regular army surgeons. Out of 156 applicants in 1875, the Army Medical Exam
board deemed only forty-one competent to serve.
