RADIO SUMMONS HELP.
CASUALTY ON STEAMER. REMARKABLE AMERICAN CASE. The steamship West Cahous, lying at anchor in Baltimore harbour about nine miles from New York, heeded help about three o’clock one morning, and needed it quickly. A member of the crew had fallen info the hold and had been seriously injured/ The captain of the ship sent out a wireless broadcast, asking for help. The call was picked up, not in Baltimore, but at Cape May, about 100 miles eastward. As Cape May was separated from the ship by parts of New Jersey’ and Delaware and by the EasternShore -of Maryland, no direct help: from there was possible.' ‘‘But the operator was on the job,” continues an announcement by the New York Public Health Service. “Promptly he consulted the long-dis-tance list in- the Baltimore telephone directory and called up the residence of the Public Health Service surgeon in charge of the Marine Hospital in Baltimore—loo miles to the west. The surgeon, roused from sleep, received the message, asked him To radio certain emergency treatment to the West Cahous, and to direct the captain to sent a boat to a certain pier in Baltimore, where he would find a surgeon, waiting to go out to the ship with him; and so, in the middle of the night, in less than an hour, a wireless-controlled sea-going ambulance carrying a public health service officer reached the side of the injujred sailor and brought him later to the hospital.” In connection with seamen’s right to free radio medical service, it is pointed out that some masters of ships may not, as yet, have been fully informed, so Surgeon-General Hugh S. Cummings has directed that posters, giving full information, be forwarded to all vessels o.f the American Merchant Marine. This medical service is really a sort of subsidy to merchant ships and sailors. A century and a .quarter ago, when Congress established the Public Health Service, under the title of the Marine Hospital Service, it directed it to render medical aid to every American seaman who applied for it, and that for this each seaman should pay 20 cents a month. This was in 1798; in- 1870 the tax was doubled, buf in 1888 it was abolished, and since then all such aid has been rendered free. Even the expense of calling the service by radio away out at sea is borne by the radio companies without expense to ship or sailor.
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Shannon News, 17 August 1923, Page 3
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407RADIO SUMMONS HELP. Shannon News, 17 August 1923, Page 3
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