Edward Lyman Munson

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Edward Lyman Munson (December 27, 1868 – July 7, 1947) was a senior officer in the U.S. Army Medical Corps who helped transform field hygiene, training, and military footwear. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he studied medicine at Yale and graduated in 1892. He chose to join the Army in 1893 after briefly considering a Navy commission. Munson served at Fort Assinniboine and Fort Adams, and with the Fifth Army Corps in Chickamauga, then went to Cuba during the Spanish–American War to organize how casualties would be evacuated.

He led a training unit for hospital corpsmen at Fort Lesley J. McNair in 1900, and when the Army Medical School reopened in 1901 he became an assistant instructor in Military Hygiene. In 1903 he served as health officer in Manila under Governor William Howard Taft. After contracting tuberculosis in 1904, he returned to the United States to recover and later became an instructor at the Army Command and General Staff College in 1908. He served again in the Philippines (1913–1915), edited Military Medicine, and participated in the Pancho Villa Expedition on the Mexican border in 1916.

Munson headed the Army Shoe Board and wrote The Soldier's Foot and the Military Shoe, based on studying the feet of about 2,000 soldiers from 1908 to 1912. He developed the Munson last, the shoe form that shaped U.S. military footwear from 1912 onward and influenced civilian shoes as well. During World War I he led the Training Division in the Surgeon General’s Office and was promoted to brigadier general in 1918.

In 1923 he was sent to Japan to command an American medical relief unit after the Great Kantō earthquake. He later served in the Philippines and, in 1931, commanded the Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks before retiring from the Army in 1932. After retirement, Munson taught Preventive Medicine at the University of California until 1939. He died in 1947 in New Haven and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside his wife, Martha Jane.