Marine Hospital Service

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Founded by act of Congress in 1798, the Marine Hospital Service was the first federal-level mechanism to provide publicly-funded health care and disease prevention in the United States. It was the point of origin for the Public Health Service and thus such present day institutions as the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a host of other federal-level health programs. The Marine Hospitals, as their name suggests, were hospitals constructed at key sea and river ports across the nation to provide health care for merchant marine sailors. Aside from the well-being of these sailors, the hospitals provided a key monitoring and gate-keeping function against pathogenic diseases.

As the nation grew, the scope of Marine Hospital Service's duties also grew to include a variety of public health functions and in 1912 the name of the service was changed to the Public Health Service to encompass its diverse and changing mission. Over time, the hospitals of the service were also expanded to include research and prevention work as well as the care of patients. Aside from merchant seamen, members of the military, immigrants, Native Americans, and people affected by chronic and epidemic diseases found a source for health care in the PHS and its hospitals.

U.S. Marine Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky (c.1909). It is currently under renovation [1].

The hospitals themselves were, by the middle of the 1800s, fairly imposing and architecturally grand structures in many cases. As long as ample federal funding was available for their construction, these hospitals were impressive examples of government-provided health care. The hospitals of the early twentieth century in major port cities such as New Orleans, San Francisco, and Savannah displayed ornate architectural detail and reflected many of the changes sweeping medicine at the time. During the Nixon administration, funding was cut to the PHS hospitals program and many of these institutions closed or were turned over to local public health offices. Eight survived as federal institutions until the early 1980s when further budget cuts put an end to their funding. Some, such as the one in Savannah, Georgia, continued as an outpatient low-income health clinic up to 2003 while others, such as the large hospital in San Francisco on the grounds of the US Army Presidio were diverted other Federal and military uses. In the case of the Presidio, the PHS Hospital was used as a site for language-training for military officers in the late 1980s.

Today, the records for these institutions sit in storage at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

[edit] External links

• The National Library of Medicine has a guide to the documents culled from various PHS hospitals when these closed.

• marinehospital.org- Website of the U.S. Hospital Foundation, which is restoring the Marine Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.