Memo to J. B. Oppenheimer on Medical Staff in the Technical Area

Hempelmann wrote to Oppenheimer on July 10, 1944 to ask for one more medical doctor in the Technical Area. The work was industrial health, meaning care for people who work around hazards. About 350 people there were exposed to various health hazards. Exposure of personnel to radiation, radioactive materials and chemical poisons had gone up considerably, and the memo says that rise demanded more medical supervision. The request is about staffing the medical side of the work, not about the research itself.

The memo sets out ways to fill the gap. One is a request through an Army colonel for a new doctor with the right training. It points to a possible candidate, a young Army doctor in Saint Louis with one year of internship and some training in medical physics, the use of physics to measure radiation and its effect on the body. Another route is moving an Army lieutenant into the medical office once a civilian pediatrician takes over his current post. Hempelmann says several pediatricians would be available, and that a senior medical officer thought the move needed no approval from a general.

On detection, Hempelmann writes that biochemistry, the chemistry of living things, was becoming more important for finding overexposure in workers. He singles out the need to develop a method for detecting overexposure to plutonium and polonium, two radioactive materials. The surviving page is partly unreadable, so the full list of his points cannot be made out. Stamps on the page say the classification was cancelled after a review in 1973.