Introduction
ONE OF THE characteristics of our time is the desire to know. From all sides and from all groups of people of all ages comes a clamor for facts. For many generations medicine and surgery were Delphic mysteries, not to be revealed except to the initiated. But in the quarter century since the first bout of this war for human freedom all this has changed. Instead of the old hush-hush about many of the functions of the body and the diseases which attack it, a searchlight has been thrown on these matters. Today everybody is endocrine- and vitamin-conscious. Most Americans are more familiar with the setting and scenery of the alimentary canal than with the great gut of Panama.
Sometimes, to one like myself who has been trained in the older, more conservative school, this interest is more than a little disconcerting. As, for example, when a beautiful young woman comes up to you at a cocktail party and says with a flutter of her eyelashes, "Oh, Admiral Oman, so you are a Navy doctor? Then won't you tell me something about venereal diseases?"
One day a very lovely, intelligent, and talented movie actress called on me. She was most interested in the health problems we have to meet, and we discussed clothing, food, amusements, and a vast variety of subjects. What was apparently the most interesting subject — that of venereal diseases — was then approached. She said she had heard that the "sulfa" drugs were working miracles in curing gonorrhea.
"Yes," I said, "they are."
In fact, the admission rate for this condition has been markedly reduced, and the wards in Navy hospitals assigned to these diseases are rather sparsely occupied. However, as I remarked: "There is still something far more efficacious than the 'sulfa' drugs, and that is 'self-denial.'"
However, I am convinced that the lady I have just referred to is one of the isolated cases. The general public interest in medical matters today is not a morbid and sadistic curiosity. It is one more symptom of the trend of public thought, which is to demand more and more accurate and authentic information about whatever concerns the public good.
Essentially, the health of our Navy is a matter in which every thinking American must be concerned.
We have always carried out a program of health education. It is laid down in Navy regulations that the officers and men shall be instructed in personal hygiene, First Aid, and some of the simple laws of preventive medicine. This instruction, also according to regulations, is carried on by the medical officers of the Navy. How important and valuable this program is, is being shown in the daily communiqués from the naval battle fronts, telling of men who are able not only to help their wounded comrades, but to survive shipwrecks, weeks of exposure on rafts, and being cast up on tropical islands where the water supply is questionable at best, and where many tropical diseases are endemic. What brings these men through these trials and dangers is not only their American intestinal fortitude, all of them are armed with knowledge. Somewhere, aboard ship, in naval training stations, or in "boot" camps, doctors wearing the Navy's blue and the gold oak leaves and silver acorns which are the insignia of the Navy Medical Corps have taught these men how to protect themselves, if possible, from infection and disease.
The story I have to tell here is the story of these seagoing doctors and their work. That work goes on in time of peace no less than in time of war. Naturally, it is a story which only a medical officer of the Navy can tell.
About forty-five years ago two brothers, born in a small town in Pennsylvania, set out from home to seek their fortunes on the seas. One, Joseph Wallace Oman, had an appointment to Annapolis. The other, myself, took the longer road, which led through the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School. Six months after graduation I was commissioned assistant surgeon in the United States Navy. That was in February 1902. A month later I had my orders to accompany a detachment of Marines to an Asiatic station. My brother was then serving as ensign aboard the U.S.S. Helena. Back in Pennsylvania the neighbors said, "So those two Oman boys have gone to sea," as though that marked us as a bad lot. For the intervening forty years both of us followed the sea, Wallace in the Line and I in the Medical Corps, passing through the various grades of the service until both of us attained the rank of rear admiral.
My brother has gone now, and there is only one seafaring Oman left. But the love of the sea, of the ships, and the men who sail it, which actuated both of us as boys and as men, is not diminished. It is concentrated now in me and is the primary cause of this book.