Great Lakes Illinois Naval Hospital Corps School Patch

The last class at Great Lakes, Class 11-125, graduated on July 28, 2011, and the Naval Hospital Corps School in Building 130H closed behind it. The school moved with the newly commissioned Navy Medicine Training Center to the Medical Education and Training Campus at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Great Lakes trained corpsmen in two stretches: a basic school during World War I that closed in 1921, and the school that reopened in 1942 and ran for nearly seven decades. For generations of corpsmen, this is where "Doc" began.

The Navy's first corps school graduated its first class at Naval Hospital Norfolk on December 15, 1902, moved to Washington, D.C., in 1907 and closed in 1911. Newport, Rhode Island, opened a school in 1914 and Yerba Buena in San Francisco followed in 1915. World War I added basic schools at Great Lakes and Norfolk, along with temporary schools at Columbia University, the University of Minnesota and the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. Hospital corps schools also ran at San Diego, Orlando and Bainbridge, Maryland. In 1979 the A school course ran 10 weeks, and since 2011 it has been taught at the Medical Education and Training Campus in San Antonio.

This is a round patch, 4 inches by 4 inches, with a cut edge that follows a gold rope border. NAVAL HOSPITAL CORPS SCHOOL arcs across the top in gold and GREAT LAKES, ILLINOIS across the bottom, with a gold star on each side. Inside a thin gold ring, a gold staff with white wings and two green serpents forms the caduceus, the corpsman's emblem, set between two red crosses. The black field makes the gold, green and red stand out from across a room. It has a sew-on backing and needs to be stitched in place.

Every corpsman remembers the classrooms, the drills and the wind off Lake Michigan at Great Lakes. The training here sent corpsmen wherever the Navy and Marine Corps went, from hospital wards to ships at sea to rifle companies in the field. Marines call them Doc, and they mean it. The school closed at Great Lakes in 2011, and the corpsmen it trained carried that start with them to every duty station after.

Sew it on a vest for a corps school reunion, or frame it in a shadow box with a graduation photo. It is a good gift for a corpsman who started at Great Lakes, or for a family member who wants to know where Doc's training began. Where it started still matters.