September 10, 2013 Veterans History Project Explores the Courage to Care Through Medical Personnel Web Feature

The Library of Congress Veterans History Project (VHP) today launches “Healing with Honor: Medical Personnel,” the 41st website feature in the Experiencing War series. “Healing with Honor” explores the courage to care during wartime with digitized, first-hand accounts from 15 military medical personnel. These stories are among the approximately 12,500 digitized collections of the 87,000 available at www.loc.gov/vets/.

“The collections featured as part of ‘Healing with Honor: Medical Personnel’ illustrate servicemen and women’s devotion to their practice, as well as the variety of jobs involved in caring for the sick and wounded during wartime,” said VHP Director Bob Patrick.

Stories are told through original photographs and manuscripts, as well as oral histories. In his memoir, Charles Stevenson narrates his experience entering Nagasaki immediately after the atomic bomb was dropped. The photographs in Longshaw Porritt’s collection offer a visual testimony of his experiences as an ambulance driver on both the Western and Italian fronts during World War I.

Other veterans profiled include George Mishtowt, a combat surgeon who flew into Holland with the 82nd Airborne Division during World War II; Martha Bell, who served as a nurse in Vietnam; and Jeffrey Roos, an anesthesiologist who treated casualties during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Congress created the Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center in 2000 to collect, preserve and make accessible the first-hand remembrances of America’s war veterans from WWI through the current conflicts, so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/vets/ or call the toll-free message line at (888) 371-5848. Subscribe to the VHP RSS to receive periodic updates of VHP news.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 155 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.