New book reveals history of Vallejo’s Mare Island Naval Hospital

VALLEJO — Thomas L. Snyder planned to major in history as an undergrad, but the copious reading assignments dissuaded him. He ended up graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and going to medical school. 

It was the Vietnam era, and at the time there was a 100% doctors’ draft. “I do not look well in green and I don’t want to sleep in the mud,” Snyder said he thought at the time. He found out through a friend that the Navy had a program called “Ensign, 1915,” which provided a pathway for individuals to attend medical school while serving in the Navy reserve before becoming officers.

“Ensign paid for my last year in medical school with the commitment that after a civilian internship I would go on three years of active duty,” Snyder said. He spent a year as a squadron medical officer on destroyers in the South China Sea, and two years in the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, taking care of the dependents of the students who were at the school.

After a year in Chicago for training, Snyder read Winds of War, by Herman Wouk. Motivated to go back to the Navy, he enlisted in the Navy Reserves. He had a 24-year career as a Navy reservist, and a 24-year career as a urologist surgeon at Kaiser. 

But Snyder never lost his passion for history. When he retired from Kaiser in 2003 he finally had the time to go back to it. “The Navy’s first West Coast hospital was in Mare Island, right across the Napa River from Vallejo, where I lived with my family,” Snyder said, “so I thought, ‘What a wonderful opportunity to combine my historical, medical, and naval interests, to write that history!’”

It was easier said than done. Snyder spent the next 20 years painstakingly putting together all the pieces of the puzzle. The result is his recently published book Mare Island Naval Hospital. A History, 1864-1957. 

The first 10 years working on the book were spent on research. Snyder traveled once a quarter to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and to archives in College Park, Maryland, to read the frequent correspondence between the Naval Hospital commanders and the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Those letters became the backbone of the book from the opening of the hospital in 1864 until 1930. Numerous fragments of the letters are reproduced in the book.

After 1930, the letters suddenly disappeared. Snyder thinks that was a result of the advent of the telephone. He resorted to local newspapers. At the time they were not digitized, so he spent hours at the Vallejo’s Naval and Historical Museum looking at the physical newspapers page by page. 

After the research was completed, Snyder abandoned the project for a few years. “Finally my wife got impatient with me and said, ‘Listen, if you don’t finish this book before you die, I’m going to kill you,’” he explained with a chuckle. To force himself to write, he rented an office space downtown so he wouldn’t get distracted.

The amount of detail in Snyder’s book is astounding. The reader knows when each window, toilet, bed and medical instrument was purchased and how much it cost. How commanders had to beg to build the hospital — the sick were previously treated on a boat with no hygienic conditions. And how after it was built the hospital proved its value by treating hundreds of soldiers and officers. Once it was built and functional, the 1898 earthquake left it in ruins, but they rebuilt bigger and better and the hospital was crucial during World War I and World War II.

The doctors at the Mare Island Naval Hospital exemplified the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of California, according to Snyder. “We pride ourselves on being creative,” he said, “and the best example in the book relates to the prosthetics program.” 

Several months before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy was calling up reservists. One of those reservists at Mare Island Naval Hospital was an orthopedist from Oakland, Lt. Cmdr. Douglas D. Tofflemier, who was taking care of amputees. At the time prosthetics were hand created out of wood. The process between fitting and receiving the prosthetic took three or four months. 

“At the Navy Shipyard we had a huge cadre of really experienced machinists,” Snyder explained, “so Tofflemier was able to work with the guys in the machine shops to create prosthetics that were more advanced than anything we had ever seen at a third of the cost. And he also had access to modern materials, like Bakelite [an early form of plastic]. As a result of the success of this program, Mare Island was designated as the amputee center for the Pacific Theater war, for the Marines and the Navy.”

Today, Touro University occupies the facilities of the Mare Island Naval Hospital. Since these are historic buildings, the University cannot tear them down or change the exterior. The buildings cannot be used as a hospital because they are outdated, but they have to be maintained. Snyder thinks Touro University only uses two or three of the 46 buildings that comprised Mare Island Naval Hospital and its adjacent facilities, such as labs and doctors’ residences.

“I believe they are now negotiating with authorities to recreate a building that looks like the original one but is built to modern standards,” Snyder said. “I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I think it’s a real issue. It’s expensive enough to run a medical school without having to worry about upkeep on buildings you can’t use. It’s a really tough problem.”

To find out more about the history of the Mare Island Naval Hospital, you can attend Thomas Snyder’s book presentation at Alibi Bookshop on Saturday March 22, at 4 p.m.