with a capacity for 5,000 more into which the men were graduated for recovery. Nearly 800,000 soldiers of the American Army were treated in our overseas hospitals during our war period. Of the hospitals in the United States a considerable number were in cantonments and camps and were chiefly used by the troops in training. The others, specialized for the use to which they were put, were for debarkation purposes and for the treatment of the wounded, ill, gassed, tuberculous or blinded. Debarkation hospitals received them as they were landed and from these they were transferred to receiving hospitals in and about the port city. Afterward, as soon as physically able, they were sent by hospital boat or train to a specialized hospital, if that were necessary, or if not to the general hospital nearest the patient’s home. These specializing hospitals were so located as to secure for each one whatever advantages were possible of situation and climate. Several hospital trains, each complete in itself, with kitchen, dining and ward cars, special beds for stretcher cases, and a car for the medical staff, were provided for transportation of the wounded by land, while a number of hospital boats properly equipped and staffed with physicians and nurses afforded transportation by water. In addition to the hospitals, convalescents were cared for in numbers of convalescent homes all over the country that were donated for that purpose by individuals and organizations who offered use of their homes, estates, clubhouses and other buildings. The Red Cross erected and staffed convalescent houses at all of the base and general army hospitals in the United States, which gave welcome, cheer and recreation to the recovering patients. Through the port of New York flowed the main stream of the American Army on its way overseas and there its individual factors had to undergo final physical examination. The work of the Surgeon of the Port expanded from week to week, as his duties in connection with the army and the army transports grew, keeping pace with the increasing numbers that were sent month by month to Europe. In one mid-summer month in 1918, and subsequent months saw even greater numbers, he put his final approval of physical fitness on 272,000 soldiers bound for the battlefields of France. On the first of July, 1917, the staff of the Surgeon of the Port of Embarkation, New York, consisted of two officers and one private. A year later there were under him 530 commissioned officers, 110 contract surgeons, 340 nurses and 2,640 men, while directly under his control, exclusive of other hospitals in the same region, were thirteen hospitals having 12,500 bed capacity of which 11,000 were ready for use.