Hammond, William A.

Born: 1828-08-28 Annapolis, Maryland

Died: 1900-01-05 Washington, DC

William A. Hammond received his early education in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and began studying medicine at sixteen years of age. He earned his medical degree in 1848 from the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York. Upon finishing his M.D., Hammond spent a year at the Pennsylvania Hospital and then obtained an appointment as an assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1849. This position sent him to New Mexico, West Point, Florida, Kansas, and Michigan. He was promoted to captain in 1854. During his military service, Hammond continued his medical research, focusing on physiology and physiological chemistry. In 1857, one of his essays on nutrition earned him the American Medical Association Prize. He later resigned from the Army and accepted a position as the chair of anatomy and physiology at the University of Maryland in 1860.

When the Civil War commenced, Hammond left academia and returned to the military in May 1861 as assistant surgeon. When the medical department of the U.S. Army was reorganized in April 1862, Hammond was appointed surgeon general with the rank of brigadier general. He made radical changes in his office, established the Army Medical Museum by special order, and increased the efficiency of the field, camp, and permanent hospital service. But in August 1864, he was dismissed from the Army under charges of irregularities in how he awarded liquor/medical supply contracts. He moved to New York and continued to practice medicine. In 1878, a bill passed for President Rutherford B. Hayes to review Hammond’s court-martial, and in 1879 Hammond retook his position as a surgeon general and brigadier general of the U.S. Army, retired.

Hammond married Helen Nisbet on July 7, 1849, in New York. The couple had several children, including Dr. Graeme M. Hammond. Helen died in 1885, and in 1886 Hammond married Esther D. Chapin.

James Evelyn Pilcher, The Surgeon Generals of the Army of the United States of America (Carlisle, PA: The Association of Military Surgeons, 1905), 47-48; James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., "Hammond, William Alexander," Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1887-1889), 3:69; Boston Evening Transcript (MA), 6 January 1900, 4:4; New York City, Compiled Marriage Index, 1600s-1800s, 7 July 1849 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2005); Gravestone, Helen, Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY; Rhode Island, U.S., Marriage Index, 1851-1920, 1 May 1886 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2000); Gravestone, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, VA.