Robert J. T. Joy (April 5, 1929 – April 30, 2019) was an American physician and career Army Medical Corps officer who was an internationally recognized scholar in the field of the history of medicine. He was also a key leader in U.S. Department of Defense Medical Research and Development, and served as one of the key founding staff members of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where he served as the first commandant of students, chair of the department of military medicine, and, after his retirement from military service, first professor and chair of the section of medical history at the university.
Education, early years, and family
Robert John Thomas Joy was born in Narragansett Village, Rhode Island, the only child of Angelo Francois Joy, an Italian immigrant hotelier, and his Narragansett-born wife Mary F. (Egan) Joy. His mother Mary was a first-generation American born of Irish Immigrant parents, and Joy described his upbringing as "lace curtain Irish." His primary and secondary education moved between Narragansett in the spring and St. Petersburg, Florida in the fall as his family moved between their hotels with the tourist trade.
After completing High School, Joy enrolled in the Rhode Island State College, receiving a Bachelors of Science with a dual major in pre-medicine and pre-law in 1950.
Joy then attended the Yale School of Medicine while participating in an Army Reserve Officers Training Corps Medical Corps scholarship—in the 1950s the Army had such programs—and completed his medical training in 1954.
It was at Yale that his life-long love of the history of medicine—and his association with the American Association for the History of Medicine began. He and a classmate restarted the Nathan Smith Club, the school's student History of Medicine Club, which had lain dormant for several years. The club met monthly at a faculty member's home, a student would present a paper, and other members would critique the paper. Joy volunteered to present the first paper when the club re-launched, and his paper would eventually be published and awarded the Association's Osler Medal for the "best unpublished essay on a medical historical topic written by a student enrolled in a school of medicine or osteopathy in the United States or Canada."
Joy was married twice. His first marriage ended in divorce and produced two children, a son and a daughter. His second wife preceded him in death by about 1 year.
Career
Internship, residency, and early assignments
Joy was awarded a reserve commission in the Medical Corps upon his graduation in June 1954, and was ordered to active duty in the Army of the United States later that month to complete an internship at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, District of Columbia. Joy later commented that while he had been offered the choice of deferring his active duty service obligation until after he had completed a civilian internship, attending an Army internship at Walter Reed made much sense to him, not only because of the quality of the training that Walter Reed would afford him, but because a First Lieutenant in the Medical Corps was paid about $250 a month, while a standard civilian intern's salary in those days was about $50 a month, and he had a wife and young child to support.
After completing his internship, Joy was commissioned in the Regular Army and transferred to the Army Medical Service School at Fort Sam Houston, Texas for completion of the Army Medical Department Officer Advanced Course. Joy would later remember the course as six months of instruction on the proper way to apply wax to hospital floors and fill out utterly meaningless paperwork—and that he was called before the Commandant of the School for allegedly serving as the ringleader of a group of Medical Corps officers who had shelled the Garrison Commander's quarters with golf balls one night using the post's salute cannon.
Following the Advanced Course Joy was sent to serve as the Battalion Surgeon of the 714th Tank Battalion, stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. As the battalion surgeon Joy served as a staff officer to the battalion commander, but he also served as the battalion's medical platoon leader at the same time, and led his platoon as the battalion engaged in a series of maneuvers at Fort Polk, Louisiana in preparation for rotation to Germany in 1956 as part of Operation Gyroscope, where the battalion would become part of the 4th Armored Group—without Joy, who by that time had moved on to his residency training in internal medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.