Chelsea History, part 4 of 6. Earlier: the Winnisimmet Ferry, Lewis Latimer and the fire of 1908.
The hill at the mouth of the Mystic River, where Samuel Maverick built a fortified house in the 1620s and where the first Winnisimmet ferry boats landed, spent almost 140 years as a Navy hospital. Today it is Admirals Hill, a neighborhood of condominiums and apartments. In between, it was where Navy doctors made one of the more hopeful discoveries of the deadliest pandemic of the twentieth century.
One of the Navy’s first hospitals
In the 1820s Dr. Aaron Dexter, a Boston physician, sold about 115 acres on the hill for $18,000 to the federal Commissioners of Naval Hospitals, according to the site’s National Register nomination. The hospital was commissioned and opened on January 7, 1836, and the National Park Service counts it as one of the first three hospitals Congress specifically authorized for naval personnel. A separate U.S. Marine Hospital for merchant seamen was completed on the grounds in December 1857. In 1915 a new, larger hospital went up farther up the hill, away from the river, and the original granite building became quarters for the staff.
The hospital took in civilians when Chelsea needed it. After the fire of April 12, 1908, more than 300 injured people were treated at the Naval Hospital, the Marine Hospital and the Soldiers’ Home hospital, according to Walter Merriam Pratt’s account of the fire.
Influenza, 1918
In late summer 1918 a new and violent wave of influenza broke out among sailors at Commonwealth Pier in Boston, across the harbor, and the sick filled the wards in Chelsea. J. J. Keegan, a Navy physician stationed at the hospital, described the outbreak in the Journal of the American Medical Association on September 28, 1918, in an early medical report on the second wave, titled “The Prevailing Pandemic of Influenza.” Across the Navy, 121,225 people were admitted to Navy medical facilities with influenza during the pandemic, and 4,158 of them died, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.
Two doctors at Chelsea, Lt. Cmdr. Lee W. McGuire and Lt. William R. Redden, tried something that had no proven basis yet. They drew blood from men who had recovered from influenza and pneumonia, separated the serum and injected it into patients who were critically ill. They published their results in JAMA in October 1918. Both men received the Navy Cross. The citations, in identical words, credit them “in developing a convalescent influenza-pneumonia serum, which has proved of very great value in reducing mortality from 38 to 4 per cent.”
The Navy also commended the hospital’s chief nurse, Elsie Brooke, who “exhibited highly commendable devotion to duty in attending to the sick, particularly during the influenza epidemic in the fall of 1918.” Convalescent serum came back into medical use, and into the news, during the COVID-19 pandemic a century later.
A future president
The hospital’s most famous patient came during World War II. After his PT boat was sunk in the Pacific, John F. Kennedy entered the Naval Hospital at Chelsea in May 1944 for treatment of his back. According to the Navy’s history of his service, he received his Navy and Marine Corps Medal there in June. Kennedy had also been a patient at Chelsea in the spring of 1942.
Closing and after
In 1970 the hospital dedicated a plaque to Wayne M. Caron, a Navy hospital corpsman from Middleborough who had served there before he was killed in Vietnam in July 1968 and was awarded the Medal of Honor. When the Boston Naval Hospital closed in 1974, it was the oldest naval hospital in continuous service in the United States, according to the Park Service. The federal government turned the property over to the City of Chelsea, and the hospital buildings were converted into condominiums in the early 1980s.
The photograph above shows the Hospital Corps Clubhouse on the hospital grounds, published in the Hospital Corps Quarterly in January 1921. The site’s older pages on the Naval Hospital, the Marine Hospital and the 1918 influenza have more photographs.
Next in the series: Jewish Chelsea, which by 1910 made up nearly a third of the city, and the synagogue on Walnut Street that was rebuilt after the fire.