Naval Medical Center Portsmouth VA Patch

The hospital on Portsmouth's Hospital Point took its first patients in 1830 and has never stopped running since, which makes it the oldest continuously operating hospital in Navy medicine. That date is stitched right under the building on this patch. Most of the people who worked or healed there knew it first as Naval Hospital Portsmouth, and some still call it that. Today it is Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, and the banner across the bottom carries the motto the command has used for years: First and Finest. The ground it stands on was once Fort Nelson, a harbor battery guarding the approaches to Norfolk.

John Haviland, the Philadelphia architect, designed the first hospital building, and construction began in 1827. When Virginia seceded in April 1861, state forces took over the grounds and the battery there went back to its old name, Fort Nelson. Union troops retook the area on May 10, 1862, and from then until the end of the war the hospital cared for Union soldiers and sailors. A $1.5 million expansion in 1941 raised capacity to 3,441 beds, and on one day in August 1944 the hospital carried 2,997 patients with a staff of 3,055. The 17-story Building 215 was the main hospital from 1959 to 1999, when the Charette Center opened with 17 operating rooms and 296 beds.

The patch is a 4.5 by 3.75 inch round with a ribbon banner swept across the bottom, finished with a cut edge and a yellow satin border. A navy blue ring carries NAVAL MEDICAL CENTER over the top and PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA along the bottom, split by two yellow stars. Inside, a gray chain circles a light blue field where the flag flies behind a winged caduceus standing over the hospital itself. The caduceus is the mark Navy corpsmen have worn on their sleeves for generations, and here it sits on the roofline like it owns the place. EST. 1830 is stitched in black under the building, and FIRST AND FINEST runs across the banner in yellow block letters.

Almost two centuries of Navy medicine have passed through that point of land on the Elizabeth River side of Portsmouth. Navy surgeons stood watches there through the Civil War, and corpsmen and nurses joined them through both World Wars and every deployment cycle since. Sailors and Marines came back from the fleet and the field to be patched up, and many of them left with a new appreciation for the people in white who did the work. For a corpsman, a stint at Portsmouth was often the first real hospital ward of a career, the place where the training turned into practice. That is a lot of history for one patch, and the people who were there will recognize every stitch of it.

It sits well in a shadow box beside a corpsman's ribbons, a photo from A-school or a set of old dog tags. It also works on a jacket, a medical bag or a vest worn to a reunion, and it makes a thoughtful gift for a Navy nurse or corpsman who did time on those wards. A small piece of the oldest hospital Navy medicine has.