Medical Department. James McGrigor served in this role from 1815 to 1851: McGrigor, who has been called the Father of Army Medicine, had served as principal medical officer under the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War. During that time he had introduced significant changes in the organisation of the army's medical services, placing them on a far more formal footing: together with George Guthrie, he instituted the use of dedicated ambulance wagons to transport the wounded, and set up a series of temporary hospitals (formed of prefabricated huts brought over from Britain) to aid the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the front line. After the end of the Peninsular War Fort Pitt in Chatham became the de facto headquarters of the Army Medical Department (the Invalid Depôt having relocated to Chatham from the Isle of Wight). A General Military Hospital was established on the site, which took on many of the functions (and most of the patients) of the old York Hospital. The influence of the Director-General grew, and from 1833 he was given sole charge of the Department. That same year the (hitherto separate) Irish Medical Board was merged into the Department, as was the Ordnance Medical Department twenty years later. The Crimean War, however, would lay bare the inadequacies of the Army Medical Department (and many others). In 1854 there were only 163 surgeons on the Department's books; the Army had just two ambulance wagons, both of which were left behind in Bulgaria, and it relied for stretcher bearers on the Hospital Conveyance Corps (which was made up of pensioners and others deemed too infirm to fight). Two base hospitals were set up in Scutari, more than 300 miles from the front. Within weeks of arriving, more than half the British force had been incapacitated by disease (mainly typhus, dysentery and cholera); and in the space of seven months some 10,000 British servicemen out of a total of 28,000 had died. The Department after Crimea In June 1855 a Medical Staff Corps was established (in place of the Hospital Conveyance Corps, which had by then been merged into the Land Transport Corps). It was formed of nine companies, overseen by a single officer, and had its headquarters at Fort Pitt. The Medical Staff Corps was set up to provide orderlies and stretcher bearers (later it was renamed the Army Hospital Corps, but reverted to its original title