1915–1929: (The Service de Santé Publique: Eleven Hospitals, the Hotel Oloffson, and the Rockefeller Medical School): The British minister’s rare moment of a…

1915–1929: (The Service de Santé Publique: Eleven Hospitals, the Hotel Oloffson, and the Rockefeller Medical School): The British minister’s rare moment of approbation in May 1929 was reserved for the U.S. Naval Medical Service, which he described as standing alone and far ahead of all American services, a great credit to the profession. Fourteen years earlier, Haiti had been rotten with hookworm, tuberculosis, filariasis, leprosy, malignant malaria, enteric diseases, yaws, syphilis, smallpox, and typhoid — the whole country, recorded Captain Kent C. Melhorn, the naval Medical Director of Public Health, teemed with filth and disease, and the few so-called hospitals were miserable shacks to which more miserable human wrecks were brought to die. The Service de Santé Publique responded by building and operating eleven modern hospitals staffed by 2,222 persons — all but two percent of them Haitian — and 147 rural or traveling clinics, in addition to four other hospitals including the U.S. Naval Hospital at Port-au-Prince, which would later become the famous Hotel Oloffson and the setting for Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians. In 1929, 1,341,596 consultations and treatments were conducted and nearly half the country’s 159 physicians worked for the Service de Santé. From 1926, the government allowed the occupation, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, to take over and reorganize the National Medical School, which with a hospital corps and dispensers’ school for the first time enabled Haiti to produce doctors and technicians with up-to-date professional qualifications.