Background
William H. Forwood was born on September 7, 1838, in Brandywine Hundred, Delaware, to Robert Forwood and Rachel Way Larkin.
William H. Forwood was born on September 7, 1838, in Brandywine Hundred, Delaware, to Robert Forwood and Rachel Way Larkin.
Forwood was educated in the local public schools and in Chester Academy at Chester, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1861, just as the Civil War was beginning.
William H. Forwood earned the honorary degree of Doctor of Law from the medical department of the Georgetown University.
In August 1861, Forwood was appointed assistant surgeon in the army and detailed as executive officer of Seminary Hospital at Georgetown, District of Columbia.
After a few months of this service, he was sent to field duty as regimental surgeon of the 14th Infantry and later served as acting medical director of Sykes’s division in the Army of the Potomac.
Following a short tour in the office of the medical director in Washington, Forwood again saw field duty as surgeon of the 6th Cavalry in Stoneman’s division. He took part in the battles of Yorktown, Gaines’s Mill, Malvern Hill, the second Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Brandy Station. In the latter engagement he received a severe gunshot wound through the chest.
After his recovery, Forwood was assigned as executive officer of Satterlee General Hospital at West Philadelphia and later was placed in command of the medical storeship Marcy C. Day. The end of the war found him in command of Whitehall General Hospital near Bristol, Pennsylvania, a hospital of two thousand beds, which he had built. Routine post duty in the West and South occupied much of Forwood’s next twenty-five years. He had experience with cholera in Kansas and with yellow fever in Texas.
During the years from 1879 to 1883 Forwood acted as surgeon and naturalist for the military reconnaissance and exploring expeditions to the northwest which were conducted annually under instructions from General Philip Sheridan. President Arthur and Secretary Robert T. Lincoln accompanied the last of these expeditions.
In 1890 Forwood became attending surgeon at the Soldiers’ Home at Washington. During part of his service here he occupied the chairs of surgery and surgical pathology (1895 - 1897) and of military surgery (1897 - 1898) in the medical department of the Georgetown University, which conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Law.
When the Army Medical School was organized in 1893 he became professor of military surgery, and with the reorganization of the school in 1901, following the Spanish War, he returned to it as president of the faculty. The flood of sick coming up from Cuba in the summer of 1898 caused the establishment of a great hospital and convalescent camp at Montauk Point, Long Island, and of this camp Forwood was made chief medical officer.
Later in the year Forwood selected the site and superintended the construction of a general hospital for returning troops at Savannah, Georgia. In December he was ordered to San Francisco as chief surgeon of the Department of California, a position of increasing importance on account of probable hostilities in the Philippines.
In 1901 Forwood returned to a desk in the office of the surgeon-general in Washington. When General Sternberg retired in June 1902, Forwood had but three months to serve before his own compulsory retirement for age. He was, however, appointed surgeon-general of the army for this brief period, an act which gave great satisfaction to the whole medical service.
Retired in September 1902, Forwood lived quietly in Washington until his death on May 12, 1915, in Washington, District of Columbia.
For forty years, William Henry Forwood served as a medical doctor in the Civil War, in the west during the postbellum period, and as a chief surgeon at Montauk Point during the Spanish-American War. During his career with the army, Forwood also supervised the building of two military hospitals, Whitehall General Hospital near Bristol, Pennsylvania, and the General Hospital of Savannah in Georgia. His botanical collecting is documented in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History.
On September 28, 1870, William H. Forwood married Mary Osbourne, daughter of Antrim Osbourne of Media, Pennsylvania. They had no children.
