CHALÅN-TA : HESLER

H­ÅYE SI HESLER?

He was Navy surgeon Frederick Alexander Hesler. Born in Chicago in 1861, he was the son of a famous photographer named Alexander Hesler. His father's photographs of Abraham Lincoln became very famous. Frederick entered the US Navy in 1884.

In August of 1900 he was assigned to Guam and arrived sometime thereafter.

He served on Guam, as a Navy doctor, for a very short time. By 1902, he was re-assigned to Cavite in the Philippines. Because of some health concerns, he was ordered to Yokohama Hospital in Japan in early 1903 but died at sea on March 11, 1903 due to heart failure.

Not long after Hesler left Guam, a street was named after him by the Naval Government. It's interesting that a man who spent less than two years on Guam would have a street named after him, but perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was an early medical officer on the island in the American administration, at a time when the Naval Government gave a lot of emphasis to health care among the people. Perhaps he assisted in the founding of Guam's first hospital. Maybe it was because he died soon after leaving Guam that the Navy wanted to honor him for his brief but important work on Guam.

The map below is from the year 1915 and already there was a Hesler Street.

HESLER'S WORDS LIVE AFTER HIM

Although Hesler died in 1903, a report he wrote just before he died continued to be quoted after his death. In this report, made to the Secretary of the Navy, Hesler stated that living for a year or more in a Pacific or Asian military base had adverse effects, physically and mentally, on many American officers.

Hesler's statement was used in the defense of an assistant Navy paymaster who had been dismissed due to irregularities in his performance. The paymaster, Phillip W. Delano, spent several years in the Philippines and China in the early 1900s, as well as on the USS Brutus when it was based on Guam for a while. He claimed that serving in Pacific and Asian duty stations had those adverse effects on him, as Hesler's report stated.