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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe estate of a decorated U.S. Navy officer has provided $3 million for scholarships for future Indiana University School of Medicine students.
The only requirement of the scholarship named for Dr. Ralph Eugene Faucett, who graduated from the med school in 1942, is that recipients be Indiana natives.
Faucett was the quintessential Indiana farm boy. Throughout his childhood, he worked alongside his father in the fields on the family farm near Milton, Indiana.
After earning a bachelor's degree in physiology and medicine, he enrolled in the IU School of Medicine. After graduating, he embarked on what would become a 32-year career as a Navy physician.
Faucett served as a surgeon during the height of World War II. He crossed the South Pacific during some of the most intense fighting of the war, caring for soldiers throughout the Mariana Islands and Okinawa campaigns as well as the post-war occupation of Japan.
His unit was deployed to Nagasaki after the atomic bombings to serve as peacekeeper forces.
Faucett returned to Japan in 1962, serving as the chief of medicine for the naval hospital in Yokosuka. He also completed Deep Sea Diving School and Submarine School and served as senior medical officer for a submarine squadron before he was named director of submarine medicine at the U.S. Naval Medical Research Laboratory.
He retired from active duty in 1974 with the rank of rear admiral, having been in command of multiple naval hospitals throughout the country.
Faucett died in January 2014. He was buried beside his family in a cemetery in Pershing, Indiana.
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