will not sailors more regardlessly expose themselves when they know that professional aid is near at hand? Should you have many wounded, would not some confusion arise to impair your effective force?"
In all the literature of the sea I do not believe there is a more eloquent argument for the presence of the Navy surgeon than these words.
Decatur yielded to them. When the time came to board the Philadelphia, he put the command of the ketch under the doctor, with seven seamen. His warning was: "The enemy, when pressed hard, will be apt to retreat from the spar deck and board the ketch from the ports of the frigate. As boats may be sent from shore to their assistance, your safety will consist in giving no quarter. I shall expect you to defend the ketch to the last man, as the successful issue of the expedition may depend on its preservation."
Heermann played his part well, and the success of the exploit in which he figured has passed into American naval history.
The United States Marines have a song for it:
From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli . . .
On those same shores of Tripoli and Tunis, United States naval doctors have carried on the tradition established by Dr. Heermann: landing by parachute with paratroopers; serving aboard submarines and the destroyers and cruisers convoying armed land forces to our campaign in North Africa, and establishing laboratories for the investigation and ultimate elimination of diseases like typhus, dysentery, and cholera, which, so far, have always followed in the wake of war.
In the past seventy-five years medicine has progressed from an art to a science. The doctor today has diagnostic aids which would have seemed fabulous to the physician of a hundred years ago. Exact laboratory tests and the X ray enable the physician to base his treatment on definite knowledge. These are as available to the
