The 8055th was one of 10 fully-functioning mobile hospitals operating during the Korean War. Army, and assigned to the 8055th MASH, which traveled along the 38th parallel, the now infamous demilitarized zone dividing the Korean peninsula into North and South Korea. Hornberger was drafted out of his surgical internship, inducted into the U.S. Wilcox was one in the inspirations for Richard Hooker’s novel “MASH,” as well as the subsequent film and tv series ‘Richard Hooker’ was a pseudonym for military surgeon H. (In the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” the fictional 4077th does move to a different location but only rarely did so in previous episodes).Īmerican military surgeons Richard Warren (1926-2009) and Roger Wilcox (1923-2006) pose beside the sign outside the 8063rd MASH (Mobile Army Surgery Hospital) camp headquarters, in South Korea, April 1952. The key word, of course, was mobile and they moved from location to location on, at least, a monthly basis. Tent-based, the people in MASH units worked long hours and endured horrific stresses of warfare. MASH units of the Korean War were located close enough to the front that wounded soldiers might be more expeditiously treated, but were distant enough so that the surgeons, nurses, and other personnel would not be exposed to direct combat. They called it triage, from the French word trier, which means to sort out. In the midst of battle, these doctors were forced to develop a system of setting priorities in their gory duties. Some were mortally wounded, others just needed to be patched up and sent back into the fray.

These units were based on a concept dating back to the Napoleonic wars, when doctors struggled to save the lives of soldiers wasted by cannons, muskets, buckshot, and shrapnel. They were initially called Auxiliary Surgical Groups and were an attempt to move surgical care closer to wounded soldiers than the fixed-in-place field hospitals then in existence.

The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, concept was first deployed by the U.S. Richard Hornberger, who wrote under the pen name of Richard Hooker. The hit television show was loosely based on the 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name and even more loosely on a 1968 novel, “M*A*S*H: A Novel About Three Army Doctors,” by former U.S. The people in MASH units worked long hours and endured horrific stresses of warfare.

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