A sick bay is a compartment in a ship used for medical purposes — the ship's hospital.
The sick bay will contain the ship's medicine chest which may be divided into separate cabinets such as a refrigerator for medicines which require cold storage and a locked cabinet for controlled substances such as morphine. The sick bay and the medicine chest should be kept locked, with the keys only being available to the medical officer and the ship's master.
The term is also applied ashore by the United States Navy and Marine Corps to treatment clinics on naval stations and Marine bases.
Sick bays appear in popular science fiction franchises, such as Battlestar Galactica or the Star Trek series, as the medical facility on board a starship.
Famous quotes containing the words sick and/or bay:
“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.”
—Bible: Hebrew The Song of Solomon 2:5.
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)