MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
Cover to paperback edition (Pocket Books, 1969)
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| Author | Richard Hooker |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | M*A*S*H |
| Genre | War, Comedy, Drama |
| Publisher | William Morrow |
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Publication date
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1968 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 211 pp |
| ISBN | |
| Followed by | M*A*S*H Goes to Maine |
MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors is a 1968 novel by Richard Hooker (the pen name for former military surgeon Dr. H. Richard Hornberger and writer W. C. Heinz) which is notable as the inspiration for the feature film MASH (1970) and TV series M*A*S*H. The novel is about a fictional U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the Korean War.
Hooker followed the novel with two sequels. Additionally, a series of sequels of rather different and lighter tone were credited to Hooker and William E. Butterworth, but actually written by Butterworth alone.
Hornberger was born in 1924 and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. After graduating from Cornell University Medical School, he was drafted into the Korean War and assigned to the 8055 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital ("M.A.S.H.' or "MASH").
M.A.S.H. units, according to one doctor assigned to the unit, "weren't on the front lines, but they were close. They lived and worked in tents. It was hot in the summer and colder than cold in the winter." The operating room consisted of stretchers balanced on carpenter's sawhorses.
Many of the M.A.S.H. doctors were in their 20s, many with little advanced surgical training. During battle campaigns, units could see "as many as 1,000 casualties a day".
"What characterized the fighting in Korea", one of Hornberger's fellow officers recalled," was that you would have a period of a week or 10 days when nothing much was happening, then there would be a push. When you had a push, there would suddenly be a mass of casualties that would just overwhelm us."
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