are lads less than twenty years old, who were students, plumbers, shoe clerks, morticians' helpers, and welders before they enlisted, make most efficient, dependable, and loyal nurses.
The second discovery they make is that they can treat the infinite variety of ailments and injuries which come to a sick bay with the limited but expertly selected pharmacopoeia a ship carries. This may call for a more inventive and exact knowledge of drugs and chemistry than many of these physicians required in civilian life, when they had offered for their use innumerable preparations put out by all the drug manufacturers in the country.
The Navy's Medical Corps is made up of physicians who are graduates of recognized medical schools. For appointment, they must be citizens of the United States and less than thirty-two years of age. The number of medical officers in the Navy, as prescribed by law, is six and one half per thousand of the total authorized strength of the Navy and Marine Corps.
Applicants for the Navy Medical Corps are selected after careful physical and professional examinations. Those selected are then sent to the Navy Medical School, which is now located at the National Naval Medical Center, a few miles outside of Washington, at Bethesda, Maryland. There the "boot" doctor is inoculated with Navy training, regulations, and tradition. He also brushes up on phases of medical work and surgery which may be more prevalent in the Navy than in civil life. For example, today very few doctors in general practice, or young internists, have had a chance to study at firsthand cholera, bubonic plague, yellow fever, dengue, dysentery, or typhus. Few of them have seen advanced cases of malaria. The Navy doctor, who may be sent to service in the Solomons, in Panama, or with the fleets in either ocean, will have need of knowledge of these tropical diseases. This we try to give him at the Navy Medical School before he reports for active duty.
The school also serves as a consultant center for the entire naval
