Research

Administrative History

Internal evidence in the series suggests that these files were kept in the Adjutant General's office. Correspondence dates to September of 1917, which marks the ending tenure of Louis W. Stotesbury as Adjutant General. Upon Stotesbury's resignation, Charles H. Sherrill became Adjutant General. As is reflected in the series, the Division of Health and Hospitals cooperated with the Adjutant General's office as well as the state Department of Health.

With the declaration of World War One, the State Department of Health placed its organization and resources at the disposal of the State Defense Council and the Adjutant General's Office. The council had responsibility for the general mobilization of the state's resources and expenditures for the military census (appropriated by Chapter 103 of the Laws of 1917). The Adjutant General's office had charge of the National Guard and detailed planning for the mobilization through its Resource Mobilization Bureau. Thus, Adjutant General Stotesbury worked closely with Hermann M. Biggs, who was chief of the council's Division of Health and Hospitals, and with staff of the Health Department's laboratories.

These offices were sources and recipients of official information on organizational and policy matters, and of correspondence traveling through both governmental and private channels. Biggs was also chair of the Tuberculosis Committee of the Medical Section of the Council of National Defense, and New York's pioneering war work to test for tuberculosis (by Roentgen-ray), assure sanitary conditions in troop camps, provide vaccines, and plan for care of tubercular soldiers is well documented in the series. Work of the division closely followed analysis of reports of the Canadian experience with returning soldiers and conditions in France during the early years of the war.

Establishment of the State Defense Council's Division of Health and Hospitals marked the start of the state's organized efforts to address health-related military issues such as: adequate supervision and care of soldiers who might be invalided at home; prevention of epidemics due to mobilization of large bodies of troops; a census of hospitals and medical and nursing resources of the state; increasing laboratory facilities to provide antitoxins, sera, and vaccines for the troops in the field and in camps; and measures for the sanitary protection of areas adjacent to concentration camps.

Specific features of the division's plan, well documented in the records, included: enforcing Chapter 469 of the Laws of 1917 (establishing a county tuberculosis hospital in each county with a population over 35,000) enacted because of reports of the large number of tubercular soldiers returned from the front in the early stages of the war; expanding the Health Department's laboratory service (developed during the Mexican Campaign of 1916) to furnish sera (for smallpox, meningitis, dysentery, pneumonia, etc.) initially for U.S. and British troops in France during the winter; conducting a medical census to assess physicians' (including osteopaths) medical training and physical fitness for war service or qualification to serve on exemption boards; conducting a hospital census to assess bed capacity and availability of treatment for incapacitated returning soldiers; enlisting all state health officers and public health nurses in the Sanitary Reserve Corps with a pledge not to serve outside the state in war work without consulting the Department of Health; extending a system (begun in Albany County) for "corrective work" to treat rejected applicants for enlistment, providing free treatment by physicians, surgeons, dentists, and opticians to enable applicants to serve; and assuring "moral welfare" and health in military training camps, by gathering information on the sale of liquor to enlisted men, investigating complaints of unsanitary conditions, indoctrinating soldiers on the danger of venereal diseases, conducting sanitary surveys on the suitability of sites for mobilization camps, and exterminating mosquitoes at encampments to prevent disease.