“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
The name of this website was inspired by an article on leadership based on two books by Sandhurst military historian John Keegan. The Face of Battle was his 1976 analysis of major battles in history including Agincourt (October 27, 1415). His 1987 book The Mask of Command highlighted styles of military leadership through history and concluded with five of what Keegan considered to be the “Imperatives of Leadership:” kinship, prescription, sanction, action, and example. The 1998 article examined Shakespeare’s speech by Henry at Agincourt (Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3) as an example of Keegan’s leadership imperatives.
In the early spring of 2020 as the COVID pandemic gained momentum, US Army Colonel (Retired) Dr. Jim Ficke and I were asked at the behest of the Governor to stand up a field hospital in the Baltimore Convention Center with a number of leaders from Johns Hopkins Medicine, the University of Maryland Medical Center and the Maryland Department of Health.
Fifteen months later the team concluded inpatient operations after providing care for 1,495 inpatients with COVID. Along the way (and often with short notice) we added missions including a mass COVID testing capability and later numerous community sites that have performed more than 110,000 tests to date. Monoclonal antibody infusions were added in the autumn of 2020 and more than 2,300 have been provided since. And finally, when vaccines became available, a large-scale vaccination center was opened that has provided more than 122,000 vaccinations since February 2021. The Baltimore Convention Center Field Hospital (BCCFH) is almost certainly the longest continually operating convention center COVID hospital in the nation, and probably the only one where the same team also provided ambulatory infusion treatment, large scale COVID testing and vaccination.
In retrospect, Keegan’s imperatives of leadership were the standard as we established and operated the hospital. In many ways, they were key elements of its success. Continue reading
Henry V 4.3 