Burned and injured patients receive care aboard USS Solace following Pearl Harbor attack.
The U.S. Navy’s Medical Department is headed by the Surgeon General and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED). A historical component has existed at BUMED since May 1907 with the establishment of the Publications Office. In addition to producing The Naval Medical Bulletin (partly available in MHL), the Publications Office was responsible for producing occasional historical monographs, and maintaining a historical archive. Today the Office of Medical History’s mission has evolved to preserve and promote the history and heritage of the Navy Medical Department while serving the needs of our customers. The collection consists of publications, public records, manuscripts, personal papers, hospital plans, Navy Hygiene Museum records, biographical files, subject files, facility files, films, videos, photographs, prints, drawings, and artifacts. The OMH currently consists of over 100 collections covering over 1,000 linear feet and is staffed by Andre Sobocinski, a historian and Michael Rhode, an archivist.
Oral histories and The Grog, an electronic publication on the history of Navy medicine, are the two main public products of the office. Oral histories have been compiled since the 1980s, and several hundred are being cataloged and arranged. Digital versions of a few have been added to the Medical Heritage Library, and many more will follow. Currently, BUMED publications have been the focus of our contribution, with Navy Medicine magazine being digitized for the first time. Navy Medicine has been published continually, although under different titles, from 1943 until now. It has ranged from clinical notes, through longer clinical articles, to newsletter items and substantial historic pieces. Issues from the present back through the 1970s have been scanned for MHL, and the whole run of the serial, and also The Grog, should be available by the end of the year. Obscure information can be found in these publications – from Navy Medicine (February 1975), one can get a list of “Antarctic Sites Named For Navy Physicians.” Easily digitized oddities such as Surgeons General Navies Of The Americas Proceedings First Conference (August 1962) and Naval Medical School manuals are also being added as I encounter them. One manuscript, Dr. Melvin Link’s World War II-era diary is in MHL, and more will be eventually added. Ship yearbooks, known as cruisebooks will be also be scanned – for now, they’re represented by a rare copy of the US Navy Fleet Hospital 107 yearbook from 1944. We’ve also catalogued and digitized over 22,000 photographs. A very small selection can be seen on a Flickr site that we share with our parent Communications Department. The office is open to queries, and can accommodate onsite researchers as well.