Talk:John Maynard Woodworth

Design of the Seal of the Service

I need to come back and edit this later when I have the right reference materials at hand, but the Army Medical Corps (of which Woodworth was formally a member) did not adopt the caduceus as the Medical Corps insignia until 1902. Prior to that the caduceus had been in use as a symbol for Hospital Stewards and the Hospital (enlisted) Corps of the Army Medical Department dating back to around 1851-1887, and then incorporated back into the design for non-commissioned officer chevrons ca. 1902. My point, though, is that the Army Medical Department was not using the caduceus as a symbol either of Army Medicine or the Medical Corps in 1874 when Woodworth created the seal. You could infer that it was being used by the Medical Department to identify its enlisted soldiers as noncombatants prior to the adoption of the Geneva cross because of the caduceus' historic association with traders and heralds, although I've never seen anything that states that explicitly.Eltrace (talk) 18:22, 5 June 2013 (UTC)