surgeon and doctor aboard ship as to the man working in the most modern and extensive medical center.
Take a look, for example, at the sick bay aboard the U.S.S. Brooklyn. Here is a typical doctor's office with its desk, medical library, and lockers for medicines and instruments. The bulkheads are scraped bare of paint to meet battle conditions. It has been found that in battle, when the ship's ventilating system is shut off and all hatches are closed, the paint tends to heat and may become a fire hazard.
Next to the medical officer's office is a completely equipped operating room with its table under shadow-proof lights and every surgical instrument you would find in the best hospitals ashore. Off this is the sterilizing room with its stainless-steel equipment. There is also a small but adequate pharmacy and laboratory, where members of the Hospital Corps put up prescriptions, make blood and urine analyses, and do all the technical work required by modern surgery and medicine.
Along the passageway is the office of the ship's dental officer, whose X-ray machine serves medical officers also.
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.
Many doctors come into the Navy from civil practice, as Medical Reserve officers for the duration of the war, and wonder at first how they are going to carry on without women nurses, and in the small confines of a fighting ship. The first discovery they all make — and admit with a simplicity that is quite touching to a doctor of the regular Navy — is that the hospital corpsmen, some of whom
