After slightly more than a year of uploading material to the Medical Heritage Library, the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s 2000th item appeared online today (May 19). A Series of Reports to the Nursing Division of the activities of the Nurse Corps Officers serving aboard the U.S. Naval Hospital in the Repose is now easily available for research. The reports from CDRs Angelica Vitillo and M.T. Kovacevich back to Captain Ruth Erickson, Director of the Navy Nurse Corps, and her successor CAPT Veronica Bulshefski date from 8 November 1965 to 2 December 1966. They are in turns informative, chatty and sad.
” Our first direct casualty which arrived Saturday, the nineteenth, was a nineteen year old bilateral mid-thigh amputee who to date has received over 45 pints of blood.” (28 February 1966)
” The improvements we have initiated in our individual staterooms have contributed to maintaining a high state of moral among the nurses, One of the base shops at Hunters Point allowed us to misappropriate an assortment of very colorful and feminine looking bedspreads for our rooms.” (13 December 1965)
“Death claimed the life of a very young man who had extensive chest wounds on Monday, the seventh and a thirty three year old arm amputee with other extensive wounds on Tuesday the eighth. Some of our young nurses are feeling these losses acutely.” (9 March 1966)
These letters join a soon-to-be complete set of over 1000 issues of 70 years of Navy Medicine magazine; oral histories with veterans of World War 2, Korea and Vietnam; a growing collection of audiovisuals including one on the Navy’s humanitarian efforts after the Vietnam War; and many other items.
A small selection of our photographs may be found on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/navymedicine/.
