← Maps

Seaman's Ticket to the Marine Hospital, 1926

1926

Download original↓

Background

All thirty-odd fill-in lines are still blank on this August 1926 Treasury Department form — the seaman's name, his ship, its home port, his nativity, height, and distinguishing marks left entirely empty, a certificate of entitlement never put to use.

The right to free medical care for American merchant seamen reaches back to 1798, when Congress passed An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, creating a chain of Marine Hospitals funded first by a 20-cent monthly wage deduction, later by direct Congressional appropriation. By 1926, a sailor employed on a qualifying vessel — one "whose personnel is entitled to medical treatment by the U.S. Public Health Service" — could present himself at any Marine Hospital and receive care at no charge, but only if someone in authority vouched for his service record first.

That vouching fell to the ship's master (the captain). Form 1915 walked him through it step by step: address the form to the Medical Officer in Charge, certify the seaman's employment dates "on honor," then have the man sign his name in the captain's presence. The physical description fields below — nativity, height, eye and hair color, distinguishing marks, years of prior service on U.S. vessels — functioned as a rudimentary identity check in an era before standardized photo identification. A footnote at the bottom instructs the receiving physician to compare the seaman's arrival signature against the one witnessed here.

The Treasury Department letterhead dates the form precisely: the U.S. Public Health Service had been housed under Treasury since the Marine Hospital Fund was created in 1798. On July 1, 1939, President Roosevelt transferred the PHS to the newly created Federal Security Agency, ending 141 years of the health-treasury pairing. Any copy of this form still in circulation after that date would have carried an obsolete header.

A notice printed sideways along the right margin warns that forging signatures or fraudulently gaining hospital admission would be prosecuted under sections 5463, 5421, or 5438 of the Revised Statutes — the pre-1926 legal codification, cited here by its older numbering rather than the newly organized United States Code. A stock number, 3–6913, appears at the lower right, most likely a Government Printing Office job identifier.

Researched with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on May 24, 2026. AI-assisted — verify before citing.

Highlights

  • The top-left header reads 'TREASURY DEPARTMENT / U.S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE / FORM 1915 / Revised August, 1926' — the form number 1915 is a Treasury Department designation, not a year.
  • The title 'MASTER'S CERTIFICATE OF SERVICE OF SICK OR INJURED SEAMEN' is set in bold centered capitals across the top third of the page.
  • The phrase 'in my presence,' is printed in bold within the body text — singling out the witnessed-signature requirement as the form's key legal act.
  • A second identity block below the main text collects nativity, age, height in feet and inches, eye color, hair color, and 'distinguishing marks' — the period equivalent of a photo ID check.
  • A right-margin warning notice is printed rotated 90 degrees, citing criminal penalties under the Revised Statutes for forgery or fraudulent hospital admission.
  • A faint blue impression is visible in the center-left area of the form — possibly a cancellation or testing stamp, though its text is not legible in this scan.

Further reading