Echoes of Navy Medicine’s Past
Part V: World War II, Pacific Theater
By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog
December 7, 1941 still represents the U.S. Navy’s greatest disaster. In just over two hours much of the Pacific Fleet had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Even before the last Japanese aircraft had disappeared over the horizon, what the raiders had accomplished by their surprise attack was catastrophic. The pride of the fleet—seven battleships that once projected U.S. might and prestige—either lay on the bottom or were too crippled to be of any immediate use. Bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns had taken a terrible toll, with the Navy alone losing 2,008 men.
The wounded and severely burned survivors of the attack required immediate treatment, and Navy medical personnel were on the scene to provide that care. Navy medicine was represented at Pearl Harbor by a naval hospital, a partially assembled base hospital, and USS Solace (AH-5), the Navy’s newest hospital ship. Heroic efforts to save lives by the men and women who manned these facilities began minutes after the first Japanese bomb fell and never waned until the last casualty was tended to.
Physicians, nurses, and hospital corpsmen on duty at Naval Hospital Pearl Harbor performed emergency surgery, treated burns, and comforted the dying. The same scene played out aboard USS Solace, which lay at anchor just beyond “Battleship Row.” Oil-soaked sailors plucked from the harbor were taken to the hospital ship for treatment.
If the ferocity of the Japanese onslaught that followed Pearl Harbor left American forces reeling, isolated, and with scant hope of reinforcement, as an institution Navy medicine was equally stretched. Possessing only limited resources and with a presence only in Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, a few small installations, and aboard the few vessels of the Asiatic Fleet, Navy medical personnel were hard pressed to treat patients as the Japanese rolled through the Pacific conquering everything before them. On 8 December 1941, World War II came to the Philippines when Japanese bombers hit Clark and Nichols Fields.
Two days later enemy bombers returned, this time destroying the Cavite Navy Yard and killing and maiming scores of Americans and Filipinos. Personnel at the nearby Cañacao Naval Hospital worked frantically to treat the wounded.
Japanese soldiers who landed on Philippine beaches in late December 1941 overwhelmed the ill-equipped and outnumbered Americans and Filipinos. By the time Japanese forces entered Manila on 1 January after GEN Douglas MacArthur declared it an open city, its battered defenders had already withdrew to the Bataan Peninsula to make their last stand.
As food and medicine ran out, disease took its toll among Bataan’s defenders. The lack of quinine for the treatment of malaria was critical, and without it many men came down with the disease. Nearly everyone suffered debilitating weakness from dysentery. Overwhelmed, Bataan’s 75,000 defenders finally surrendered in April 1942.
But out in Manila Bay, the island fortress of Corregidor still remained defiant despite a lack of food and ammunition. After a month of heavy bombardment and finally landings by Japanese forces, Corregidor surrendered on May 6th. American power in the Far East had been extinguished. Yet despite the new reality, the hundreds of medical professionals captured in the Pacific were still “Doc” or “Nurse” to their fellow POWs. Without hospitals or supplies, they continued to practice their healing art, often under unimaginable circumstances.
Some 10,000 surrendered at Corregidor after thousands of captured Americans and Filipinos had already died on the infamous Bataan Death March. Those who survived Japanese brutality and neglect now faced Japanese prison camps. For the approximately 17,000 Americans and 12,000 Filipino scouts who surrendered in the Philippines, the real ordeal had barely begun. Torture, forced labor, starvation and death became the norm in Japanese POW camps throughout the Far East.
Even though physicians and corpsmen did the best they could to provide health care in these camps, they had virtually no drugs or instruments. Malaria and dengue fever were endemic. Sanitation was non-existent and almost everybody had dysentery. Many came down with deficiency diseases like scurvy, optic neuritis, and beriberi. By the summer of 1942 the Japanese held over 50,000 prisoners, 20,000 of whom were Americans.
Eleven of these were Navy nurses from the Cañacao Naval Hospital. They spent the war in internment camps at Santo Tomás in Manila and then at Los Baños in the Philippine countryside, where they were finally liberated in February 1945. Many of their male colleagues never made it home, either succumbing to disease, starvation, brutal treatment by their captives, or dying by “friendly fire” when the so-called hell ships in which they were being transported to Japan were sunk by American submarines or aircraft.
Despite the fate of these unfortunate POWs, the war against Japan was in full swing by the summer of 1942. Reconquering territory held by the enemy was the priority and it meant fighting island by island, each one a stepping stone to Tokyo. Organizing the Navy Medical Department to care for the thousands of Navy and Marine Corps casualties generated by opposed amphibious landings, make them well, and then return them to duty was the major priority. It was in the Pacific war that Navy medicine faced its greatest challenge dealing with the aftermath of intense, bloody warfare fought far from fixed hospitals. This put enormous pressure on medical personnel closest to the front and forced new approaches to primary care and evacuation.
The most dramatic and demanding duty a Navy hospital corpsman could have was with Marine Corps units in the field. Because the Marine Corps has always relied upon the Navy for medical support, corpsmen accompanied the leathernecks and suffered the brunt of combat themselves. Many of them went unarmed, reserving their carrying strength for medical supplies.
Navy corpsmen were the first critical link in the evacuation chain. From the time a Marine was hit on an invasion beach at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and a host of other Pacific islands, the corpsman braved enemy fire to render aid. He applied a battle dressing, administered morphine, and tagged the casualty. If he were lucky, the corpsman might commandeer a litter team to move the casualty out of harm’s way and on to a battalion aid station or a collecting and clearing company for further treatment. This care would mean stabilizing the patient with plasma, serum albumin, and, later in the war, whole blood. In some cases, the casualty was then moved to the beach for evacuation. In others, the casualty was taken to a divisional hospital, where doctors performed further stabilization, including emergency surgery if needed.
Navy hospital ships, employed mainly as ambulances, provided first aid and some surgical care for the casualties’ needs while ferrying them to base hospitals in the Pacific or back to the United States for definitive care. As the war continued, air evacuation helped carry the load. Trained Navy nurses and corpsmen staffed the evacuation aircraft.
Enabling the Navy and Marine Corps to defeat the enemy also meant recognizing that disease more often than enemy action threatened this goal. During the battle for Guadalcanal in the Solomons, malaria caused more casualties than Japanese bullets. Shortly after the landings, the number of patients hospitalized with malaria exceeded all other diseases. Some units suffered over a 100 percent casualty rate with personnel being hospitalized more than once. Only when malaria and other tropical diseases were brought to heel could the Pacific war be won.
Navy medical personnel moved quickly to reduce the impact of malaria and other tropical diseases. Personnel trained in preventive medicine oiled malaria breeding areas and sprayed DDT. Physicians and corpsmen dispensed quinine and atabrine as malaria suppressants.
The Pacific war was massive in scale, fought over vast stretches of ocean. Fleets engaged one another often many miles distant from one another. Carrier-based aircraft were the surrogates that sought out the enemy and delivered the ordnance. U.S. Navy task forces consisting of carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts required their own medical support and each of these vessels had among their crews corpsmen, physicians, and, aboard the larger vessels, dentists as well. By October 1945 the fleet numbered over 7,000 vessels from landing craft and auxiliaries to the Essex class carriers and Iowa class battleships. The hundreds of vessels smaller than destroyers had their corpsmen to be sure, but the larger vessels rated physicians, corpsmen, dentists, fully equipped sick bays, battle dressing stations, and usually an operating room. The standard medical complement for a 7,250-ton escort carrier was one medical officer, a flight surgeon for the embarked air group, a dentist, and about 13 corpsmen. A much larger 27,100-ton Essex class carrier like USS Franklin (CV-13) boasted four physicians augmented by a flight surgeon, 3 dentists, and 31 corpsmen. During routine operations, physicians and corpsmen serving aboard vessels in the South Pacific encountered and treated heat and humidity related maladies exacerbated by confinement without air conditioning—heat exhaustion and stroke, fungus infections, heat rash, and breathing disorders.
The encounters between Japanese and American fleets were most often brutal affairs with many casualties generated in both brief and sustained actions. Torpedoes, bombs, and armor-piercing shells produced horrendous wounds. When the Japanese launched their kamikaze terror campaign, medical personnel were often overwhelmed. A single suicide plane plunging through the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and igniting fueled and armed aircraft produced hundreds of burn victims within seconds. As the fighting drew ever closer to the Japanese home islands in early 1945, thousands of sailors were killed and wounded by these human-guided missiles.
Navy medical personnel also served aboard submarines that prowled the Pacific destroying thousands of tons of Japanese shipping. Among its crew, each submarine carried one highly trained corpsman or pharmacist’s mate, as they were then called. (Physicians were not assigned to submarines.) Indeed, one of the most dramatic stories to come out of World War II recounted an emergency appendectomy performed by a 23-year-old corpsman as his submarine, USS Seadragon, cruised submerged in enemy waters. The corpsman, Wheeler B. Lipes, successfully removed the badly infected appendix and saved his patient. This heroic story not only highlighted the skill and resourcefulness of Navy corpsmen, but also buoyed the nation’s spirits early in the war when news from the Pacific was anything but encouraging.
When World War II finally ended with the Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri (BB-63) on 2 September 1945, the U.S. Navy had become the largest maritime force the world had ever known. And the Medical Department which supported that Navy would itself never again have as many personnel, or staff as many hospitals, dispensaries, and hospital ships as it did on that day.
What followed victory was rapid demobilization as soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in the Pacific theater headed home. Helping get them there were aircraft carriers, battleships, LSTs, and Navy hospital ships—all of which became troop transports in what was called “Operation Magic Carpet.”
Showing posts with label Navy Medical Birthdays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Navy Medical Birthdays. Show all posts
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Echoes of Navy Medicine’s Past: Navy Medicine in the “Great War” and Inter-War Years, 1917-1941
Echoes of Navy Medicine’s Past
Part IV: Navy Medicine in the “Great War” and Inter-War Years, 1917-1941
By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany, and American isolationism headed for temporary retirement. The United States was now committed to its first European conflict. In order to maintain the health of a rapidly growing wartime Navy and care for its sick and injured, the Navy Medical Department had to recruit and train hundreds of physicians, dentists, and nurses, as well as thousands of hospital corpsmen.
Even though the U.S. Navy never engaged a German fleet during its year and a half participation in World War I, Navy medical personnel served with Marine Corps units on the Western Front; aboard every man-of-war, troop transport, and supply ship; with submarine divisions, aviation groups; and with the United States Railway Battery in France. In 1917, the Navy deployed 38 physicians, 5 dentists, and 348 hospital corpsmen to France; nurses went as well. What they encountered were trench warfare’s frightful realities—trench foot, disease, rats, vermin, the complete absence of the most rudimentary hygiene, and the terrifying results of gas warfare—mustard, phosgene, and chlorine.
Those medical personnel with the Marine Brigade in France also had to deal with other war trauma—shrapnel, blast injury, high velocity projectile wounds, and psychiatric disorders, then collectively known as shell-shock. From that terrible conflict in Europe, medical personnel became skilled in trauma resuscitation, the treatment of wounds and infectious disease, and war’s psychological wounds. disease, and the psychological wounds of war.
Because of the prevalence of communicable diseases, preventive medicine was a major component of a Navy physician’s daily routine. Indeed, illness could be acquired in places other than the battlefield. According to one Navy physician, venereal disease in wartime France increased because control of licensed prostitution had become less rigid. By his account, 50 percent of French prostitutes were infected with syphilis in its primary or secondary stages.
Aviation and submarine medicine were born during World War I. Both fields should not have surprised anyone for the airplane and submarines were, for the first time, used extensively by the combatants. During the 1920s and 1930s, these new technologies would keep many Navy personnel busy learning how to protect the human body in both hypobaric (aviation) and hyperbaric (undersea) environments. To support the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, the Navy established five hospitals. They included Navy Base Hospitals Numbers 1 and 5 at Brest France, Navy Base Hospital No. 2 at Strathpeffer, Scotland, Navy Base Hospital No. 3 at Leith, Scotland, and Navy Base Hospital No. 4 at Queenstown, Ireland.
Notable among these medical facilities were the base hospitals in Brest. That city served as a major port where American troops disembarked and thousands of wounded were sent home. Navy Base Hospital No. 5 had a minimum capacity of 500 beds and throughout the war it averaged 400 patients. During the influenza epidemic that number reached 800. The hospital had all the facilities necessary for providing advanced medical and surgical care and received patients from other naval stations in France, from the Merchant Marine, and from U.S. naval facilities of all classes. The hospital remained in operation until March 1919.
The Navy added to its “fleet” of hospital ships in 1918 with the acquisition of two former steamships, Havana and Saratoga, which became USS Comfort (AH-3) and USS Mercy (AH-4), respectively. Although provisions of the Geneva Convention protected hospital ships, Navy officials feared that the German government would not abide by these agreements. As a result, both vessels remained in American waters until the final month of the war when they were used as troop transports.
Navy medical personnel exhibited great valor during World War I. A total of 60 Medical Corps officers, 12 Dental Corps officers, and 500 hospital corpsmen were assigned to field service with the Marine Corps. By the time the war ended in 1918, two physicians, two dentists, and two hospital corpsmen had earned the Medal of Honor; 684 citations and awards were awarded to the 331 Navy medical personnel who served in France.
Navy Cross recipient Lena H. Sutcliffe Higbee (1874-1941), Superintendent of the Nurse Corps, was one such honoree. She helped pioneer a new training program to augment the number of nurses being deployed to France when trained nurses were in short supply. The “Vassar Training Camp” served as a finishing school for many of these nurses. During Higbee’s tenure, the Navy Nurse Corps grew from 160 in April 1917 to 1,386 by the Armistice in November 1918.
It has been said that the “war to end all wars” closed not with a bang but a “cough.” Even after the Armistice was signed, Navy medical personnel, including Higbee’s nurses, continued to combat the so-called “Spanish Flu” in the pandemic that ultimately killed between 22 and 40 million people worldwide.
A year after the Armistice, Navy medical personnel found themselves involved in another conflict that grew out of the Russian Revolution. When Allied forces intervened in a civil war between “Whites” and “Reds in post-Czarist Russia, the Navy went with them. Navy Medical personnel participated in other post-war foreign interventions, most notably in Haiti. During the U.S. occupation, which lasted from 1915-1934, Navy medical officers and hospital corpsmen served in the public health arm of the newly created Haitian gendarmerie supervising the drainage of low-lying areas, the cleaning of streets in cities and villages, and the control of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Even though the period between the world wars saw a shrinking military, the United States was the only nation to maintain hospital ships. The aging and obsolete Solace was decommissioned in 1921 and replaced by Relief (AH-1), the first U.S. vessel to be built as a hospital ship from the keel up. She was commissioned on 28 December 1920 with a bed capacity for 500 patients, and served as the largest, most modern, and best equipped hospital ship up to that time. Relief also became the first Navy hospital ship to allow Navy (female) nurses aboard as regular staff.
The inter-war period also saw swift developments in military and civil aviation, which solved many problems concerning human endurance and the adverse effects of accelerative forces, anoxia, fatigue, and psychological stress. To deal with these aviation related issues, the U.S. Naval Medical School instituted a course in aviation medicine.
Japanese aggression in China, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the threat of a new world conflict initiated a rebuilding program for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s. In a message to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt recommended a 20 percent increase in our naval strength, and Congress took heed. From June 1939 to June 1941, the number of active duty Navy physicians went from 841 to 1,957; the Dental Corps increased from 255 to 511; the Nurse Corps increased its rolls from 439 to 524; and the Hospital Corps increased in size from 4,467 to 10,547. By the summer of 1941, the Navy had 23 hospitals in commission and two hospital ships. It was not enough. On 6 December 1941, who could have anticipated what lay ahead for a nation and a Navy unprepared for war.
Part IV: Navy Medicine in the “Great War” and Inter-War Years, 1917-1941
By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany, and American isolationism headed for temporary retirement. The United States was now committed to its first European conflict. In order to maintain the health of a rapidly growing wartime Navy and care for its sick and injured, the Navy Medical Department had to recruit and train hundreds of physicians, dentists, and nurses, as well as thousands of hospital corpsmen.
Even though the U.S. Navy never engaged a German fleet during its year and a half participation in World War I, Navy medical personnel served with Marine Corps units on the Western Front; aboard every man-of-war, troop transport, and supply ship; with submarine divisions, aviation groups; and with the United States Railway Battery in France. In 1917, the Navy deployed 38 physicians, 5 dentists, and 348 hospital corpsmen to France; nurses went as well. What they encountered were trench warfare’s frightful realities—trench foot, disease, rats, vermin, the complete absence of the most rudimentary hygiene, and the terrifying results of gas warfare—mustard, phosgene, and chlorine.
Those medical personnel with the Marine Brigade in France also had to deal with other war trauma—shrapnel, blast injury, high velocity projectile wounds, and psychiatric disorders, then collectively known as shell-shock. From that terrible conflict in Europe, medical personnel became skilled in trauma resuscitation, the treatment of wounds and infectious disease, and war’s psychological wounds. disease, and the psychological wounds of war.
Because of the prevalence of communicable diseases, preventive medicine was a major component of a Navy physician’s daily routine. Indeed, illness could be acquired in places other than the battlefield. According to one Navy physician, venereal disease in wartime France increased because control of licensed prostitution had become less rigid. By his account, 50 percent of French prostitutes were infected with syphilis in its primary or secondary stages.
Aviation and submarine medicine were born during World War I. Both fields should not have surprised anyone for the airplane and submarines were, for the first time, used extensively by the combatants. During the 1920s and 1930s, these new technologies would keep many Navy personnel busy learning how to protect the human body in both hypobaric (aviation) and hyperbaric (undersea) environments. To support the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, the Navy established five hospitals. They included Navy Base Hospitals Numbers 1 and 5 at Brest France, Navy Base Hospital No. 2 at Strathpeffer, Scotland, Navy Base Hospital No. 3 at Leith, Scotland, and Navy Base Hospital No. 4 at Queenstown, Ireland.
Notable among these medical facilities were the base hospitals in Brest. That city served as a major port where American troops disembarked and thousands of wounded were sent home. Navy Base Hospital No. 5 had a minimum capacity of 500 beds and throughout the war it averaged 400 patients. During the influenza epidemic that number reached 800. The hospital had all the facilities necessary for providing advanced medical and surgical care and received patients from other naval stations in France, from the Merchant Marine, and from U.S. naval facilities of all classes. The hospital remained in operation until March 1919.
The Navy added to its “fleet” of hospital ships in 1918 with the acquisition of two former steamships, Havana and Saratoga, which became USS Comfort (AH-3) and USS Mercy (AH-4), respectively. Although provisions of the Geneva Convention protected hospital ships, Navy officials feared that the German government would not abide by these agreements. As a result, both vessels remained in American waters until the final month of the war when they were used as troop transports.
Navy medical personnel exhibited great valor during World War I. A total of 60 Medical Corps officers, 12 Dental Corps officers, and 500 hospital corpsmen were assigned to field service with the Marine Corps. By the time the war ended in 1918, two physicians, two dentists, and two hospital corpsmen had earned the Medal of Honor; 684 citations and awards were awarded to the 331 Navy medical personnel who served in France.
Navy Cross recipient Lena H. Sutcliffe Higbee (1874-1941), Superintendent of the Nurse Corps, was one such honoree. She helped pioneer a new training program to augment the number of nurses being deployed to France when trained nurses were in short supply. The “Vassar Training Camp” served as a finishing school for many of these nurses. During Higbee’s tenure, the Navy Nurse Corps grew from 160 in April 1917 to 1,386 by the Armistice in November 1918.
It has been said that the “war to end all wars” closed not with a bang but a “cough.” Even after the Armistice was signed, Navy medical personnel, including Higbee’s nurses, continued to combat the so-called “Spanish Flu” in the pandemic that ultimately killed between 22 and 40 million people worldwide.
A year after the Armistice, Navy medical personnel found themselves involved in another conflict that grew out of the Russian Revolution. When Allied forces intervened in a civil war between “Whites” and “Reds in post-Czarist Russia, the Navy went with them. Navy Medical personnel participated in other post-war foreign interventions, most notably in Haiti. During the U.S. occupation, which lasted from 1915-1934, Navy medical officers and hospital corpsmen served in the public health arm of the newly created Haitian gendarmerie supervising the drainage of low-lying areas, the cleaning of streets in cities and villages, and the control of disease-carrying mosquitoes.
Even though the period between the world wars saw a shrinking military, the United States was the only nation to maintain hospital ships. The aging and obsolete Solace was decommissioned in 1921 and replaced by Relief (AH-1), the first U.S. vessel to be built as a hospital ship from the keel up. She was commissioned on 28 December 1920 with a bed capacity for 500 patients, and served as the largest, most modern, and best equipped hospital ship up to that time. Relief also became the first Navy hospital ship to allow Navy (female) nurses aboard as regular staff.
The inter-war period also saw swift developments in military and civil aviation, which solved many problems concerning human endurance and the adverse effects of accelerative forces, anoxia, fatigue, and psychological stress. To deal with these aviation related issues, the U.S. Naval Medical School instituted a course in aviation medicine.
Japanese aggression in China, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the threat of a new world conflict initiated a rebuilding program for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s. In a message to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt recommended a 20 percent increase in our naval strength, and Congress took heed. From June 1939 to June 1941, the number of active duty Navy physicians went from 841 to 1,957; the Dental Corps increased from 255 to 511; the Nurse Corps increased its rolls from 439 to 524; and the Hospital Corps increased in size from 4,467 to 10,547. By the summer of 1941, the Navy had 23 hospitals in commission and two hospital ships. It was not enough. On 6 December 1941, who could have anticipated what lay ahead for a nation and a Navy unprepared for war.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Echoes of Navy Medicine’s Past: Enter the All Steel Navy (1866-1917)
Echoes of Navy Medicine’s Past
Part III: Enter the All Steel Navy (1866-1917)
By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog
If he were still alive in the years immediately following the American Civil War, French magistrate Alexis de Tocqueville may have observed a nation devoted to uniting its “house divided” through free enterprise and Western expansion. The U.S. Navy did not fit into this equation for national healing. After the Civil War, it lapsed into a period of dramatic decline as naval appropriations were cut and the number of ships and men on active duty shrank dramatically. The Navy and Navy Medical Department were, in a true sense, landlocked.
Medical Department resources were deemed “entirely inadequate to the proper support of the naval medical service, however prudently administered.” Because of inadequate remuneration in pay, low entry rank, and scant opportunity for promotion, few young physicians joined the Navy.
In his 1867 annual report to the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Dr. Phineas Horwitz (1822-1904), complained bitterly about the Medical Department’s immediate prospects. He pointed out that 48 vacancies existed in the Medical Corps which were impossible to fill “properly.” The number of unfilled vacancies since the end of the recent war had grown to such a degree that according to some, the Navy Medical Department would simply disappear. Horwitz urged Congress to pass legislation immediately to increase the opportunities for promotion in respect to both rank and pay.
On 3 March 1871, Congress acted, granting medical and other staff officers of the Navy “relative rank” with grades “equal to but not identical with the grades of the line.”
This Act went further than any previous Congressional action in strengthening and transforming the Navy Medical Department. The Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery now held the additional title “Surgeon General,” with the relative rank of Commodore.” Surgeon General William Maxwell Wood (1809-1880) stood at the helm of this “revitalized” organization. At the time, Wood was a man entering his 42nd year of a naval career as unusual and varied as could be. He had served aboard USS Poinsett, one of the first steam vessels of the Navy, and designated flagship during the “expedition for the suppression of Indian hostilities on the coast of Florida” (a.k.a. the Seminole War). Wood served shore duty at Sackett’s Harbor, NY, Baltimore, was Fleet Surgeon of the Pacific Fleet, and served under Commodore Sloat in California during the Mexican War. Despite his credentials as the first Navy Surgeon General, he served less than two years.
The health of the Navy’s personnel steadily improved following the war partly due to the new emphasis on preventive medicine and hygiene. This was attributable, at least in part, to the transition from wooden hulls and sail to the all-steel, steam-powered Navy. The storage of coal in below-deck bunkers and the exhaust gases generated by its combustion required adequate ventilation. Moreover, the foul condition of many ships’ bilges had become a regular theme of reports from the Navy Surgeon General to the Secretary of the Navy. Conditions aboard many naval vessels were blamed for yellow fever outbreaks and led to the establishment of the short-lived and seldom used Navy quarantine hospital on Widow’s Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay (1887).
On 20 March 1878, the Navy Department created a board of naval officers to solve the ship ventilation problem. The board advocated a ventilation plan consisting of a tube network running through every part of the ship and terminating in a large main through which air was drawn by a steam blower. In 1879, Surgeon General Phillip Wales urged the rapid installation of this new ventilation system throughout the fleet
During the 1870s the naval hygiene movement was promoted by Medical Directors Joseph Wilson, Jr., author of Naval Hygiene (1870), and Albert L. Gihon’s Practical Suggestions in Naval Hygiene (1871). As early as 1879, the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) established a laboratory for investigating hygiene-related issues and began collecting items which would comprise the collection of the Navy Museum of Hygiene, established in Washington, DC, in 1882. Until it merged with the Naval Medical School in 1905, the Museum exhibited ship’s ventilation systems and housed displays illustrating disinfection techniques. It also was a leader in promoting environmental and occupational medicine. The institution went beyond its museum role by becoming an education center for the promotion and development of laboratory research, particularly with chemical, bacteriological, and microscopic investigations.
As American interests in the Pacific and the Far East became more prominent in the 1870s, so did the scope of the Navy Medical Department. Between 1867 and 1869, USS Idaho, which had been converted into a hospital ship and kept at anchor in Nagasaki, served as a floating hospital for the American Squadron in the Far East.
To provide more adequate medical facilities for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific activities, the Navy constructed new hospitals at Mare Island, CA (1870) and Yokohama, Japan (1872), which became the first U.S. Navy hospital in Asia.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s U.S. Navy presence became increasingly evident throughout the world as Navy vessels were being assigned to the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, European, Pacific, and Asiatic stations. In addition to routine cruises, the Navy was frequently called upon to protect American citizens and American interests; to give assistance to victims of shipwrecks, earthquakes, fires, floods, and civil war; and to carry out special explorations in the Arctic, Alaska, Central America, and elsewhere.
As Navy medical officers went ashore at hundreds of ports throughout the world, many of them wrote detailed observations of climate and medical conditions, the people, quality of medical facilities available, endemic diseases, and the methods being employed to combat them. Many of these narratives were published in volumes of the Annual Reports of the Navy Surgeon General (1871-1859).
On 17 June of that year, a century after the “first” loblolly boy reported for duty aboard USS Constellation, an Act of Congress established the Navy Hospital Corps. Navy Surgeons General had long promoted a well-trained professional corps to provide medical care in the field. However, it was only after the outbreak of the war with Spain that Congress finally acted. The first group of hospital corpsmen numbered only 25 pharmacists (apothecaries) with rank, pay, and privileges of warrant officers.
The Hospital Corps came just in time. Following the Spanish-American War, the world’s newest colonial power had “spoils” to administer—Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Samoa. The United States was now a Pacific naval power with new ships, new stations, and enlarged hospitals. Navy medical officers had to confront tropical diseases few Western physicians had ever seen before—dengue, yaws, leishmaniasis, leprosy, yellow fever, intermittent fever, filariasis, dysentery, elephantoid fever, not to mention venereal afflictions sailors acquired in exotic liberty ports.
The Navy Medical Department dealt with these issues through training. In 1902, the Navy Medical School, then located at the U.S. Naval Laboratory in Brooklyn, NY, relocated to the Naval Museum of Hygiene in Washington, DC. Its mission was straightforward: The new school was “for the instruction and training of newly appointed medical officers in professional branches peculiar to naval requirements.” Here was an institution where newly commissioned physicians could learn the kind of medicine they would not have been exposed to in civilian medical schools—tropical medicine, the treatment of ballistic wounds, burns—in short, the grist of naval medicine. A five-month course had a curriculum covering microscopy, naval hygiene, military law, and a program of physical exercise and military drill akin to what any student might experience in a military school or service academy.
Because tropical disease had accounted for many of the casualties suffered by troops in Cuba during the recent war with Spain, it was a chief focus of attention at the school. Indeed, future Surgeon General of the Navy Edward Rhodes Stitt (1867-1948), today considered the pioneer in tropical medicine, taught at the school and was one of its first commanding officers.
Following the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps in 1902 by Congressional Act, BUMED campaigned for its own nurse corps. This effort paid off on 13 May 1908, when the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps was established. The first nurses in the Navy—a.k.a. the “Sacred Twenty”—reported for orientation and duty later that year at the new U.S. Naval Hospital, Washington, DC. The site also housed the Museum of Hygiene and Navy Medical School. On 8 August 1908, former U.S. Army nurse, Esther Voorhees Hasson (1867- 1942) became the first superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps.
The Medical Department continued to expand. On 22 August 1912, President William Howard Taft signed a bill authorizing “not more than 30 acting assistant dental surgeons to be part of the Medical Department of the United States Navy.” By the beginning of World War I, the Navy Medical Department had grown in size to four separate corps. The Surgeon General, now with the rank of rear admiral, was at its helm. The Medical Department had 2 hospital ships and 17 naval hospitals to administer.
On 9 April 1914, Mexican soldiers arrested U.S. Navy personnel seeking supplies in Tampico, Mexico. The Mexicans released the soldiers but without the apology President Woodrow Wilson demanded. Wilson ordered RADM Frank F. Fletcher to occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz with the naval forces under his command. The U.S. intervention and occupation fomented fierce Mexican resistance and generated casualties on both sides. For their heroic actions treating the wounded under fire, Navy surgeons Middleton Elliott (1872-1952), Cary Langhorne (1873-1948), and Hospital Apprentice 1st Class William Zuiderveld (1888-1978) were awarded the Medal of Honor. Shortly thereafter, there would be ample opportunities for heroism. Just four years after the Mexico intervention, Navy Medical personnel would find themselves braving U-boats in the North Atlantic German soldiers on the Western Front.
Part III: Enter the All Steel Navy (1866-1917)
By Jan Herman and Mr. Grog
If he were still alive in the years immediately following the American Civil War, French magistrate Alexis de Tocqueville may have observed a nation devoted to uniting its “house divided” through free enterprise and Western expansion. The U.S. Navy did not fit into this equation for national healing. After the Civil War, it lapsed into a period of dramatic decline as naval appropriations were cut and the number of ships and men on active duty shrank dramatically. The Navy and Navy Medical Department were, in a true sense, landlocked.
Medical Department resources were deemed “entirely inadequate to the proper support of the naval medical service, however prudently administered.” Because of inadequate remuneration in pay, low entry rank, and scant opportunity for promotion, few young physicians joined the Navy.
In his 1867 annual report to the Secretary of the Navy, Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Dr. Phineas Horwitz (1822-1904), complained bitterly about the Medical Department’s immediate prospects. He pointed out that 48 vacancies existed in the Medical Corps which were impossible to fill “properly.” The number of unfilled vacancies since the end of the recent war had grown to such a degree that according to some, the Navy Medical Department would simply disappear. Horwitz urged Congress to pass legislation immediately to increase the opportunities for promotion in respect to both rank and pay.
On 3 March 1871, Congress acted, granting medical and other staff officers of the Navy “relative rank” with grades “equal to but not identical with the grades of the line.”
This Act went further than any previous Congressional action in strengthening and transforming the Navy Medical Department. The Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery now held the additional title “Surgeon General,” with the relative rank of Commodore.” Surgeon General William Maxwell Wood (1809-1880) stood at the helm of this “revitalized” organization. At the time, Wood was a man entering his 42nd year of a naval career as unusual and varied as could be. He had served aboard USS Poinsett, one of the first steam vessels of the Navy, and designated flagship during the “expedition for the suppression of Indian hostilities on the coast of Florida” (a.k.a. the Seminole War). Wood served shore duty at Sackett’s Harbor, NY, Baltimore, was Fleet Surgeon of the Pacific Fleet, and served under Commodore Sloat in California during the Mexican War. Despite his credentials as the first Navy Surgeon General, he served less than two years.
The health of the Navy’s personnel steadily improved following the war partly due to the new emphasis on preventive medicine and hygiene. This was attributable, at least in part, to the transition from wooden hulls and sail to the all-steel, steam-powered Navy. The storage of coal in below-deck bunkers and the exhaust gases generated by its combustion required adequate ventilation. Moreover, the foul condition of many ships’ bilges had become a regular theme of reports from the Navy Surgeon General to the Secretary of the Navy. Conditions aboard many naval vessels were blamed for yellow fever outbreaks and led to the establishment of the short-lived and seldom used Navy quarantine hospital on Widow’s Island in Maine’s Penobscot Bay (1887).
On 20 March 1878, the Navy Department created a board of naval officers to solve the ship ventilation problem. The board advocated a ventilation plan consisting of a tube network running through every part of the ship and terminating in a large main through which air was drawn by a steam blower. In 1879, Surgeon General Phillip Wales urged the rapid installation of this new ventilation system throughout the fleet
During the 1870s the naval hygiene movement was promoted by Medical Directors Joseph Wilson, Jr., author of Naval Hygiene (1870), and Albert L. Gihon’s Practical Suggestions in Naval Hygiene (1871). As early as 1879, the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) established a laboratory for investigating hygiene-related issues and began collecting items which would comprise the collection of the Navy Museum of Hygiene, established in Washington, DC, in 1882. Until it merged with the Naval Medical School in 1905, the Museum exhibited ship’s ventilation systems and housed displays illustrating disinfection techniques. It also was a leader in promoting environmental and occupational medicine. The institution went beyond its museum role by becoming an education center for the promotion and development of laboratory research, particularly with chemical, bacteriological, and microscopic investigations.
As American interests in the Pacific and the Far East became more prominent in the 1870s, so did the scope of the Navy Medical Department. Between 1867 and 1869, USS Idaho, which had been converted into a hospital ship and kept at anchor in Nagasaki, served as a floating hospital for the American Squadron in the Far East.
To provide more adequate medical facilities for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific activities, the Navy constructed new hospitals at Mare Island, CA (1870) and Yokohama, Japan (1872), which became the first U.S. Navy hospital in Asia.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s U.S. Navy presence became increasingly evident throughout the world as Navy vessels were being assigned to the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, European, Pacific, and Asiatic stations. In addition to routine cruises, the Navy was frequently called upon to protect American citizens and American interests; to give assistance to victims of shipwrecks, earthquakes, fires, floods, and civil war; and to carry out special explorations in the Arctic, Alaska, Central America, and elsewhere.
As Navy medical officers went ashore at hundreds of ports throughout the world, many of them wrote detailed observations of climate and medical conditions, the people, quality of medical facilities available, endemic diseases, and the methods being employed to combat them. Many of these narratives were published in volumes of the Annual Reports of the Navy Surgeon General (1871-1859).
On 17 June of that year, a century after the “first” loblolly boy reported for duty aboard USS Constellation, an Act of Congress established the Navy Hospital Corps. Navy Surgeons General had long promoted a well-trained professional corps to provide medical care in the field. However, it was only after the outbreak of the war with Spain that Congress finally acted. The first group of hospital corpsmen numbered only 25 pharmacists (apothecaries) with rank, pay, and privileges of warrant officers.
The Hospital Corps came just in time. Following the Spanish-American War, the world’s newest colonial power had “spoils” to administer—Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Samoa. The United States was now a Pacific naval power with new ships, new stations, and enlarged hospitals. Navy medical officers had to confront tropical diseases few Western physicians had ever seen before—dengue, yaws, leishmaniasis, leprosy, yellow fever, intermittent fever, filariasis, dysentery, elephantoid fever, not to mention venereal afflictions sailors acquired in exotic liberty ports.
The Navy Medical Department dealt with these issues through training. In 1902, the Navy Medical School, then located at the U.S. Naval Laboratory in Brooklyn, NY, relocated to the Naval Museum of Hygiene in Washington, DC. Its mission was straightforward: The new school was “for the instruction and training of newly appointed medical officers in professional branches peculiar to naval requirements.” Here was an institution where newly commissioned physicians could learn the kind of medicine they would not have been exposed to in civilian medical schools—tropical medicine, the treatment of ballistic wounds, burns—in short, the grist of naval medicine. A five-month course had a curriculum covering microscopy, naval hygiene, military law, and a program of physical exercise and military drill akin to what any student might experience in a military school or service academy.
Because tropical disease had accounted for many of the casualties suffered by troops in Cuba during the recent war with Spain, it was a chief focus of attention at the school. Indeed, future Surgeon General of the Navy Edward Rhodes Stitt (1867-1948), today considered the pioneer in tropical medicine, taught at the school and was one of its first commanding officers.
Following the establishment of the Army Nurse Corps in 1902 by Congressional Act, BUMED campaigned for its own nurse corps. This effort paid off on 13 May 1908, when the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps was established. The first nurses in the Navy—a.k.a. the “Sacred Twenty”—reported for orientation and duty later that year at the new U.S. Naval Hospital, Washington, DC. The site also housed the Museum of Hygiene and Navy Medical School. On 8 August 1908, former U.S. Army nurse, Esther Voorhees Hasson (1867- 1942) became the first superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps.
The Medical Department continued to expand. On 22 August 1912, President William Howard Taft signed a bill authorizing “not more than 30 acting assistant dental surgeons to be part of the Medical Department of the United States Navy.” By the beginning of World War I, the Navy Medical Department had grown in size to four separate corps. The Surgeon General, now with the rank of rear admiral, was at its helm. The Medical Department had 2 hospital ships and 17 naval hospitals to administer.
On 9 April 1914, Mexican soldiers arrested U.S. Navy personnel seeking supplies in Tampico, Mexico. The Mexicans released the soldiers but without the apology President Woodrow Wilson demanded. Wilson ordered RADM Frank F. Fletcher to occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz with the naval forces under his command. The U.S. intervention and occupation fomented fierce Mexican resistance and generated casualties on both sides. For their heroic actions treating the wounded under fire, Navy surgeons Middleton Elliott (1872-1952), Cary Langhorne (1873-1948), and Hospital Apprentice 1st Class William Zuiderveld (1888-1978) were awarded the Medal of Honor. Shortly thereafter, there would be ample opportunities for heroism. Just four years after the Mexico intervention, Navy Medical personnel would find themselves braving U-boats in the North Atlantic German soldiers on the Western Front.
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