Marine hospital

“ Admission of cases for study There may be admitted into marine hospitals for study persons with infectious or other diseases affecting the public health, and not to exceed ten cases in any one hospital at one time. ”

“ SURGEON QUICK: stated that he was connected with a Marine Hospital, which did not take T.B. or N.P. cases; that the patients were beneficiaries of the Veterans’ Bureau and were mostly of the surgical type; and that he felt there was very little he could add to what had already been brought to the attention of the gentlemen present. He stated that he believed the large percentage of medical men would agree that rehabilitation was more of a medical matter than an educational one. ”

“ Limitation of medical, surgical or hospital services Hospitalization of the dependents of naval and Marine Corps personnel and of the persons outside the naval service mentioned in section 34 of this title shall be furnished only for acute medical and surgical conditions, exclusive of nervous, mental, or contagious diseases or those requiring domiciliary care. ”

“ Allowance of rations to Navy hospitals For every Navy officer, seaman, or marine admitted into a Navy hospital, the institution shall be allowed one ration per day during his continuance therein, to be deducted from the account of the United States with such officer, seaman, or marine. ”

“ The caring for the veteran patients in the same hospitals in which the sick of the Navy are being treated. In assigning accommodations to the patients of the Veterans’ Bureau there are 120many problem which complicate this matter. Manifestly it is necessary for the Navy to be prepared to receive the patients from its own personnel, and when it is considered that the fleet may at one time be in the port of New York and sending its sick to the New York Hospital during such time and then sail away for another port to then transfer its sick to another hospital the difficulties are apparent. ”

“ Surgeon-General Rixey lamented publicly that when the fleet left Hampton Roads it had no hospital ship with it. While there can be no doubt that some cases could receive better attention on a hospital ship than on a battleship, especially in the way of better quarters and possibly better diet, it is also true that none of the sick on the fleet suffered seriously from the lack of a hospital ship, unless it was in tubercular cases. ”

“ During its two years of work for the sick and wounded, no military hospital has succeeded in establishing a finer record. To see it is a wonderful experience. The hospital consists of 17 wards, with 578 beds, and is entirely staffed by women—surgeons, doctors, pathologists, oculists, dental surgeons, anæsthetists, dispensers, nurses, orderlies. The only men are the patients.
Sir Alfred Keogh, the Director-General of the Army Medical Service, said, when speaking of it: “The hospital is in every respect a military hospital, differing in no way from any other military hospital in the country. ”

“ He has taken out the cabins and made big wards and has accommodations for 800 sick or wounded men. I never saw anything so cleverly done as the way he is making over that ship. He has a splendid operating room, an X-Ray complete equipment, a steam laundry, and absolutely everything that a modern big city hospital has. It will be ready to sail, he said, in ten days, although to us there seemed to be an enormous{19} amount yet to do. They no longer have women nurses on the hospital ships. ”

“ It need not be mentioned, that the surgeon is in constant attendance upon the dying man, who has generally been removed from his hammock to a cot, which is larger and more commodious, and is placed within a screen on one side of the sick bay, as the hospital of the ship is called. It is usual for the captain to pass through this place, and to speak to the men every morning ”

“ It might also be right to have reserve wards for what must occur every now and then in a Military Hospital, an influx of patients beyond the usual number, or an outbreak of cholera, or some malignant epidemic, which it might be desirable to isolate from the other patients. ”

“ Anthony is designed to care for the needs of the French shore folk; the hospital at Battle Harbour—the first established, and, possibly, the best equipped of all—receives patients from all directions, but especially from the harbours of the Strait and the Gulf. In the little hospital-ship, Strathcona, the doctor himself darts here and there and everywhere, all summer long, responding to calls, searching out the sick, gathering patients for the various hospitals. She is known to every harbour of the coast; and she is often overcrowded with sick bound to the hospitals for treatment or operation. ”

“ The closure of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the resulting construction of the National Military Medical Center at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland, and a new military hospital at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, offer the Department of Defense the opportunity to provide state-of-the-art and world-class medical facilities offering the highest quality of joint service care for members of the Armed Forces and their families. ”

“ Treating men who are seriously injured in a large, well-equipped hospital ashore, where it is possible to give them the absolute rest they require, is one thing. Treating them in a small and crowded sick bay aboard ship, and while that ship is running at full speed in a danger zone, knowing that the enemy may renew their attack again at any moment, and that the patients may have to be put over the side on rafts or merely in life jackets, is another story. ”

“ The wounded sailors, who were on board the Russian cruiser, Varyag, numbering twenty-four persons were taken first to the French cruiser, Pascal, and then to a temporary hospital that had been hastily established at Chemulpo by our Society. For twenty-two days, those sailors were entirely under the care of the hospital, in which, of course, all necessary treatment was given to them. Unfortunately, however, two of the patients died and the rest when convalescent were brought to a hospital at Matsuyama, Japan. ”

“ While one clearing station is filling up and treating the patients, the other will be sending all possible treated cases down the line. From the base hospitals, which are near the sea, the men are forwarded as soon as advisable by hospital ships for distribution among the hospitals of England. ”

“ Discipline of patients at Army and Navy Hospital All persons admitted to treatment in the Army and Navy General Hospital at Hot Springs, Arkansas, shall, while patients in said hospital, be subject to the rules and articles for the government of the armies of the United States. ”

“ Any vessel at anchor in the bay with an epidemic on board, has, according to arrangement, simply to hoist a flag on the mainmast, whereupon the Government steamer immediately embarks the sick persons. In order more effectually to keep from all contact with the population of the town, such shipboard patients as are labouring under infectious complaints, another hospital has been established on the Island of Marica, situated beyond the bar. ”

“ Across the passageway is the cruiser's hospital, or sick bay, with beds for twenty-five patients. The complement of a cruiser is about 1,200 men, so the hospital facilities more than equal those of the most progressive civilian communities. The medical staff of a cruiser usually consists of a chief medical officer, together with an assistant and a dental officer. Under these officers are several pharmacist's mates, trained as anesthetists, laboratory technicians, bacteriologists, and chemists, who give advanced first aid and care for the injured and sick. ”

“ The glorious halls and corridors, the massive marble pillars, the splendid marble staircases, indicate wealth, but the perfection of the sanitary and scientific arrangements tells of long years of anxious thought and study and research. So perfectly is this marvellous hospital built that, in the event of plague or cholera breaking out to such an extent as to infect the building, the whole of the inside of the hospital can be removed and another hospital will still be left standing as complete as the other. ”

“ Ninety per cent of the patients admitted to the Army and Navy Hospital are either cured or relieved. Taking into consideration the large number of old civil war veterans treated at the hospital, whose ailments have become chronic, this is a very remarkable showing. ”

“ But although there are not wanting medical officers in the service who, on being promoted to staff-surgeon, appear to forget that ever they wore less than three stripes, and can keep company with no one under the rank of commander, I am happy to say they are few and far between, and every year getting more few and farther between.
It is a fine thing to be appointed for, say three or four years to a home hospital; in fact, it is the assistant-surgeon’s highest ambition. Next, in point of comfort, would be an appointment at the Naval Hospital of Malta, Cape of Good Hope, or China. ”

“ Another problem is the question of creating, in connection with General hospitals, wards where patients of this sort may receive at the beginning of their treatment, their preliminary examination, where they may be evacuated home with compensation or without compensation, or evacuated to a prolonged treatment hospital for further care.
It has sometimes been difficult to get enough men, trained personnel, to man these wards. ”

“ Still another value of this centralization of records and materials grows out of the exceptional mobility of military life. Frequently, it is necessary or desirable to transfer military patients from one hospital to another— as for example, from a post hospital to a more commodious and better-equipped general hospital, or perhaps to a hospital with unusual facilities for the treatment of a particular disease. ”

“ In addition, seven relief hospitals were established in Dayton View, Miami City, Edgemont, South Park, the Davis Sewing Machine Company’s plant, North Dayton, and Riverdale, with a surgeon of the medical corps of the National Guard and a corps of civilian physicians and Red Cross nurses in charge of each. These stations had maternity, general, and infectious wards. Hospital and proved infectious cases were promptly forwarded to St. Elizabeth’s or the Miami Valley Hospital. The base hospital received all cases among the companies of the National Guard on duty ”

“ In conducting the Military Hospitals, we found that it was always right to discharge the Patients from the sick Hospitals as soon as they were recovered, and to send them either to Billet, or to a convalescent Hospital; because recovered Men are always the most riotous; besides they crowded the Hospitals, and were in Danger of catching fresh Disorders from those who were sick; and therefore the recovering Men in every Hospital ought to be reviewed once or twice a Week by the Physician or Surgeon, and the Names of such Men as are well enough, to be marked ”

“ I visited both of the great hospitals, Savonières and Hôpital Central, inside of an hour, for a military automobile goes like lightning and turns aside for no one. The former hospital is situated in a beautiful park some distance from Bar-le-Duc, and the greater one in a cup of the hills, and looks like a new Western mining town. There are some twenty or thirty barracks, two of concrete; but it is so unmistakably a hospital and nothing else (in France) that a taube recently had no difficulty in picking out the main building and dropping a bomb in the operating room. ”

“ The cooperation of the American Red Cross with the medical service of the Army and Navy consists of recruiting, organizing and equipping base hospital and other hospital and ambulance units to be called into service when required by the Army or Navy Medical Corps; handling special problems of health and sanitation in connection with the cantonments, camps and naval stations; stimulating the manufacture of surgical dressings and hospital supplies of all kinds; and promoting the comfort and welfare of the men in training or en route from their homes to camps and training stations. ”

“ Many patients were unconscious, or too badly injured to speak. Forty-seven per cent of all the cases brought to the hospital were burned. Many were thickly coated with fuel oil. Practically all were in a state of shock.
The Navy is a stickler for records. All through a man's career in the service, whether just for a hitch or for life, two careful, up-to-the-minute, detailed accounts are kept of him. One is his service record ”

“ The situation of these two harbor hospitals, and of the hospital at Fort Hamilton, was especially favorable for the treatment of the very sick patients received from the transports directly from Santiago, or from the general hospital at Camp Wikoff. The remarkably small death-rate is directly attributable to the skill and devotion of the surgeons and nurses, to the carefully prepared food, and to the sea air blowing through the tents. ”

“ At the time we were there six hundred soldiers were under treatment. Deaths run about two per cent.
This was my first visit to an army hospital and the impression will never be forgotten. There were men in all different stages of wounds, some of them convalescent; others on the dividing line; with others the treatment was just starting. This American Ambulance is considered the best managed hospital in all France. General Frank H. Mason, who had been consul general and in the consular service more than thirty years, had charge of it up to the time of his death. ”