"1st Surgeon General" John Maynard Woodworth Clipped Signature For Sale

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"1st Surgeon General" John Maynard Woodworth Clipped Signature:
$489.99

Up for sale a RARE! "1st Surgeon General" John Maynard Woodworth Clipped Signature. 

ES-9951

John Maynard Woodworth (August

15, 1837 – March 14, 1879) was an American physician and member of the Woodworth political family.

He served as the first Supervising-Surgeon General under U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, then changed to Surgeon

General of the United States Marine Hospital Service from 1871

to 1879. Woodworth was born at Big Flats, Chemung County, New York. His family soon moved to Illinois, where Woodworth attended school in Warrenville. He

studied pharmacy at the University of Chicago and

worked as a pharmacist for a time. Woodworth was

one of the organizers of the Chicago Academy of Science and in 1858 became curator of

its museum. In this capacity, he made several trips west of the Mississippi River to collect natural history specimens.

He was appointed naturalist by the University of Chicago in

1859 and asked to establish a museum of natural history. Woodworth also spent time working at

the Smithsonian Institution over

the next few years. He then decided to embark on medical studies, and graduated

from the Chicago Medical College in

1862. Almost immediately upon graduating from medical school, Woodworth was

appointed Assistant Surgeon in the Union Army. He was soon promoted to Surgeon and eventually became Medical Director of

the Army of the Tennessee.

Woodworth served under General William Tecumseh Sherman,

and on "Sherman's March to the Sea"

he was in charge of the ambulance train, bringing the sick and wounded to Savannah without the loss of a single man. After the war,

Woodworth became a companion of the Pennsylvania Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. Following

the Civil War, Woodworth spent

a year in Europe, receiving clinical instruction chiefly in the

hospitals of Berlin and Vienna. In 1866, he became demonstrator in anatomy at

the Chicago Medical College.

He was also appointed Surgeon of the Soldier's home of Chicago and Sanitary Inspector of the Chicago Board of Health in

that same year. In 1871, Woodworth was appointed the first Supervising Surgeon

of the Marine Hospital Service.

The Service had its origins in a 1798 Act of Congress "for the relief of sick and disabled seamen." The

1798 law created a fund to be used by the Federal

Government of the United States to provide medical services

to merchant seamen in

American ports, which was expanded to include military and others who made

their living associated with seagoing. The marine hospital fund was

administered by the Treasury

Department and financed through a monthly deduction from the

wages of the seamen. Medical care was provided through contracts with existing

hospitals and, increasingly as time went on, through the construction of new

hospitals for this purpose. The earliest marine hospitals were located along

the East Coast of the United

States, with Boston being the site of the first

such facility, but later they were also established along inland waterways,

the Great Lakes, and the Gulf Coast and Pacific Coast. The marine hospitals hardly constituted a

system in the Antebellum period. Funds

for the hospitals were inadequate, political rather than medical reasons often

influenced the choice of sites for hospitals and the selection of physicians,

and the Treasury Department had little supervisory authority over the

hospitals. During the Civil War, the hospitals for their own use, and in 1864 only 8 of the 27

hospitals listed before the war were operational. In 1869, the United

States Secretary of the Treasury commissioned an extensive

study of the marine hospitals, and the resulting critical report led to the

passage of reform legislation in the following year. The 1870 reorganization

converted the loose network of locally controlled hospitals into a centrally

controlled Marine Hospital Service,

with its headquarters in Washington, D.C.. The position of Supervising was created to administer the Service. Woodworth began his

service in the position on March 29, 1871, and he moved quickly to reform the

system. He adopted a military model for his medical staff, instituting

examinations for applicants instead of appointing physicians on the

recommendation of the local Collector of

Customs. Physicians, whom Woodworth placed in uniforms, were no

longer appointed to serve in a particular facility, but appointed to the

general Service. In this way, Woodworth created a cadre of mobile, career

service physicians who could be assigned and moved as needed to the various

marine hospitals. The uniformed services component of the Marine Hospital

Service was formalized as the Commissioned Corps by legislation enacted in 1889 under

Woodworth's successor, John B. Hamilton. In 1872, Woodworth initiated the publication

of annual reports of the Marine Hospital Service. That same year he also served

as one of the founders of the American Public Health

Association. From the time of his appointment, Woodworth envisioned

broader responsibilities for the Marine Hospital Service, well beyond the care

of merchant seamen. In 1873, his title was changed to Supervising Surgeon

General. He issued publications on cholera and yellow fever, and laid the foundations for the passage of

the National Quarantine Act of 1878. This Act conferred quarantine authority on the Marine Hospital Service,

initiating a process whereby over the next half a century the Service

progressively took over quarantine functions from the states. The Act also

authorized the publication of Bulletins of the Public

Health (the forerunner of the Service's journal Public Health Reports).

The Marine Hospital Service thus moved into public health activities under

Woodworth, paving the way for its later evolution into the Public

Health Service. Woodworth also designed the seal of the Service,

which he first used on a publication that he authored in 1874 on Nomenclature

of Diseases. The seal consisted of a fouled anchor, to represent the

seamen cared for by the Service, and the caduceus of

Mercury. The latter symbol was particularly appropriate since it served as a

symbol of commerce (which could represent the merchant marine) but was also

used by the Army Medical Corps as

its symbol. With minor changes in design, this device has remained the seal of

the Public Health Service to the present day. Woodworth remained in the

position of Supervising Surgeon General until his death in Washington, DC, on

14 March 1879. 

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"1st Surgeon General" John Maynard Woodworth Clipped Signature

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