Hospital Unit Summoned to Engage in Active Training

Organized by the Harvard Medical School as a continuation of the famous Base Hospital which operated in France during the last war, the present Base Hospital Unite No. 5 yesterday received definite and final orders for mobilization.

Organized so as to be ready at a moment's notice for service anywhere, the Unit will be one of four or five in the United States trained to give immediate hospital care to wounded and sick wherever necessary. In World War 1 the Harvard Unit was noted for its invaluable service abroad.

The latest orders, following a preliminary warning of December 24 advising members that they would shortly be called to active duty, provide for report by the personnel of the Unit to an eastern seaboard camp in the near future, and their departure from the country shortly afterwards.

This event will mark the first major exodus of members of the Harvard, Faculty since the war started last month. The personnel of the 5th Hospital Unit will include 60 officers taken almost entirely from the staff of the Medical and Dental Schools and the Hygiene Department, and 44 nurses recruited in the Boston Area.

Cutler Not Director

At the request of the University, the Surgeon General has refused to permit Dr. Eliot C. Cutler, Moseley Professor of Surgery, to proceed with the Unit into foreign service as its director. The request for Dr. Cutler's release was made because of the pressing need for his services in Boston in his vital capacities as Moseley Professor of Surgery at the Medical School, as Surgeon-in-Chief of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and as director of the Medical Division of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety.

Major Augustus Thorndike, associate in Surgery, Surgeon to the Department of Hygiene, and Surgeon to the Harvard Athletic Association, will desert his post as chief medico at Soldiers Field in order to become assistant chief of the Surgical Service of the Base Hospital Unit.