Responsibilities of the Medical Staff 



The TEKTITE II physicians were charged primarily with the responsibilities of 



(1) evaluating the medical suitability of the individual aquanaut applicants; 



(2) medically supervising the diving missions and the decompression procedures 

 following them; (3) establishing a base-camp dispensary to serve the medical 

 needs of the aquanauts and all support personnel; and (4) assuring maintenance 

 of proper sanitation and hygiene in base camp and aboard the Minitat support 

 vessel, the R/V UNDAUNTED. 



In outline, on-site medical supervision during the program was thus structured: 



1. At least one watch physician was on duty at all times during the 

 50-ft missions. An additional physician came on duty each day at 8:30 a.m. 

 and remained until 5 p.m. 



2. During decompression at least two physicians were on duty 24 hours a 

 day. A third medical officer was available during the day to attend to any 

 emergent medical problems unrelated to the decompression. 



3. A Coast Guard medical corpsman was assigned to assist in the base- 

 camp dispensary. 



4. An assistant medical officer (Peter Philbin, M.D., of the USPHS) was 

 assigned responsibility, under the supervision of the Medical Director, for 

 the 100-ft missions. He remained on duty at the site of the Minitat trials 

 from early August until the program was aborted in late October, 1970. 



The medical staff's responsibility for support personnel extended to the crews 

 of the UNDAUNTED and, to a much smaller degree, the ADVANCE II, the oceano- 

 graphic research ship that offered some logistic support during the project. 

 A small area of supervision was that of rest-and-recreation dives over the 

 weekends. Every effort was made to have a doctor along on these expeditions, 

 in view of the frequent bad weather and heavy seas in and around Lameshur Bay. 



Dependents of TEKTITE families also came under the purview of the medical staff. 

 The families were originally scheduled to use local medical facilities (princi- 

 pally on St. Thomas island); but it soon became apparent that this arrangement 

 would be unsatisfactory, because these facilities were, overcrowded with patients 

 and understaffed with doctors. Although most dependents did, in fact, rely on 

 the dispensary and the TEKTITE doctors for medical assistance, a list of local 

 specialists was maintained to whom TEKTITE personnel might be referred for 

 diagnosis and treatment. 



The Dispensary 



The dispensary, the headquarters of the TEKTITE II medical program, consisted 

 of the rear half (measuring 9 ft x 12 ft) of an air-conditioned building in 

 base camp. As far as medications and suture materials were concerned, the 

 dispensary could have qualified as a reasonably equipped general-practitioner's 

 office. It was, additionally, furnished with an electrocardiograph, ophthal- 

 moscope, and slit-lamp binocular ophthalmoscope. Its capabilities for handling 

 in-patients, however, were not spectacular, in that it contained only one 

 bunk bed. 



IX-3 



