The naval medical officer not only is responsible for the health of the personnel of the Navy, but he is also the medical officer for the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is an integral part of the Navy and functions under the Secretary of the Navy, although it has its own commandant, with the rank of lieutenant general.
This brings the medical officer into all landing parties, temporary occupation of ports until the Army takes over, and into large military campaigns. During World War I many of our medical officers won great honors and distinction while serving with the Marines in France, particularly in Belleau Wood and at Château-Thierry. I served with the Marine Guard at Peking, China, for a period of about three years, and also in the Philippines, and have never experienced a more pleasant, varied, and interesting duty.
The recent addition of the Waves to the Navy has provided a group of women who are rendering excellent service. There are a number of commissioned officers, as well as those holding enlisted ratings. The commissioned doctors are on duty where there are other Waves stationed, and also in large hospitals, particularly in the technical departments. They serve to release for sea duty members of the regular Navy.
Though a Bureau of Medicine and Surgery was established by Act of Congress only on August 31, 1842, there have been ships' surgeons in the United States Navy since the first ship was commissioned. This was the Alfred, whose first lieutenant, John Paul Jones, hoisted the Star and Rattlesnake flag to her masthead in the harbor of Philadelphia in 1775. Aboard the U.S.S. Alfred, to fight the British in the Atlantic, sailed the first American Navy doctor — Joseph Harrison, M.D.
An act of the Continental Congress of that same year, which ordered the formation of a naval force, allotted "a surgeon and a surgeon's mate to each vessel." The surgeon's pay was approximately twenty-five dollars a month.
Some of those early ships' surgeons were doughty fellows. They had to be, to stand the seafaring life of those days. Wasn't it old
