Dr. Rand Percy Crandall (1866 – 1938) was a physician in the U.S. Navy, and an enthusiastic amateur microscopist during the 1890s.
He was elected to The Lambs in 1895 when he was stationed in New York.
He joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1890, and the American Microscopical Society in 1891. He resigned from the AMS during 1897, suggesting that his time as an active microscopist may also have ended that year. All of his known microscope slides are dry-mounts of foraminifera and other oceanic objects. As a naval officer, he sailed throughout the world, and may have collected all of these specimens himself.
Rand Percy Crandall was born in New York City on January 21, 1866. His parents, Henry and Margaret Crandall originally hailed from Nova Scotia, Canada. The 1875 census of New York recorded Henry Crandall as being a “shipping merchant”. Percy was the eldest of at least four children.
Crandall graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with his M.D. degree in 1887. He appears to have immediately entered the U.S. Navy. He was promoted from Assistant Surgeon to Surgeon in 1899.
In December, 1888, Crandall sailed as Assistant Surgeon aboard the U.S.S. Galena on a military expedition to Haiti. He evidently stayed on that island for some time, as he wrote a medical paper on “phthisis in Haiti” in 1890 (“Phthisis” is pulmonary tuberculosis).
In 1890, Crandall joined The American Association for the Advancement of Science. The next year, he joined The American Microscopical Society. He was then based at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. During 1894, he was reassigned, and listed his postal address as the Navy Pay Office of San Francisco, California. He spent over a year, probably including much of 1894, in Hawaii.
Crandall was also an avid bicyclist. A member of The Brooklyn Bicycle Club, Crandall reported that he rode over 2600 miles between April and September, 1896. He appears to have taken his bicycle with him aboard ship, as he wrote of biking abroad. In 1895, he described the excellent roads of Hawaii, stating that “in several hundred miles of wheeling never came across an unridable road”.
As would be expected of a naval officer, Crandall moved frequently and served aboard numerous ships. In 1898 he was on U.S.S. Iowa. In 1901, he served aboard the U.S.T.S. Constellation at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island. He sailed on the U.S.S. Oregon and U.S.S. New Orleans between 1904-08, visiting the Philippines and Australia. In 1913, he was assigned command of the Naval Hospital in Canacao, Philippines. In 1919, by then promoted to the rank of Captain, was appointed head of the Medical Supply Depot in Brooklyn, New York.
Crandall died on December 8, 1938, in Brooklyn. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.