Marine Biologists

I just found this while looking for something else. That's usually the way it is around here. It's from the BUMED (U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine) collection that we scanned. It has to be under copyright, so hopefully someone will tell us who the cartoonist is.

Reeve 035097

Reeve 035097
Originally uploaded by otisarchives1

I just uploaded several medical illustrations of empyema on our Flickr page. I came across at least a couple of dozen of them today and this is the first installment.

Another one of those weird coincidences

Yesterday I received a question about a Dr. Trudeau who practiced from about 1830-1877 (who, it turned out, we don't have any information about). Out of curiosity and because we have the massive Vorwald Collection that includes tuberculosis research done at the Trudeau Foundation at the Saranac Laboratories in New York, I Googled the name and dates and found this entry on Wikipedia:

[Edward Livingston] Trudeau had two sons, Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr., who died of tuberculosis, and Francis B. Trudeau, who succeeded his father at the sanatorium as director until 1954. Francis B. Trudeau's son, Francis Trudeau, Jr. is the father of cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Where the coincidence comes in is that we have original art for the April 21 and 22, 2004 Doonesbury comic strips, which of course are done by Garry Trudeau.

Good advice during this flu season

Some helpful advice I found while searching for images in the Archives -

 

Jasmine High, MA

Archives Technician

Otis Historical Archives

National Museum of Health and Medicine

Graphic Tales of Cancer in America

I'll be lecturing on this on Sunday, November 22 at 10 am at the History of Science Society meeting. If you're planning on being there, stop in and say hello. - Mike

Otis Archives' Flickr image used to make art

Joanna of Morbid Anatomy pointed out that Tanya Johnston used some images from the Ball Collection on the Archives' Flickr site to make a piece of artwork. Cool! That's what public domain is all about.

To see it, click through the link to her site, click on illustration at the top, and then click on the right arrow to get to the second page of illustrations. It's the bit with all the eyes in the middle.

Only a pathologist

Who else would make art based on a house fly's intestinal parasite?

On defining a psychiatric disease

Op-Ed Contributor

The Short Life of a Diagnosis

By SIMON BARON-COHEN

Published: November 10, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/opinion/10baron-cohen.html

 

Asperger syndrome and autism should be thoroughly tested before being lumped together in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

 

Dissection makes Amazon's Top 10 for 2009 in Science

Dissection, based on works from a medical museum, has made Amazon's Top Ten Best Books of 2009 in Science, Editor's Picks.

Medical challenge coin challenge

Challenge coins have been proliferating in recent years, due to decreasing costs among other reasons.

Information can be found in this article -http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110102261.html

 

We have an extremely large, but not well-catalogued, numismatics collection occupying a couple of safes in Historical Collections. To better position the Museum for the long-term addition of these to the numismatics collection, I’ve proposed that we scan the ones that people have on their desks, and record who was giving the coin out and when. I did the ones on my desk this morning

 

Einstein correspondence

This week, or maybe it was last week, I found two letters that were signed by A. Einstein. I think they may have been form letters because they were addressed to Dear Friend, but it looks like the signatures are original. Maybe an expert out there can make a guess.

James Carroll turns up again

I think I wrote about James Carroll, who volunteered to be bitten by a mosquito carrying yellow fever. He contracted the disease which had long-term effects on his health and when he died, several years later, his widow was unsuccessful in securing a government pension.

 

His name turned up again just now. We got a request for some information on a soldier wounded at Little Big Horn, which led me to pull the accession file that includes an article written about skeletal remains at the battlefield. There's a photograph of a skull and the caption says it was discovered by hospital steward James Carroll of Fort Custer, in 1886. Could this be the same man?

 

Sure seems like it. The James Carroll who died of the effects of yellow fever was at Fort Custer during this time and was later assigned to be Walter Reed's assistant when Surgeon General George Sternberg chose Reed to teach Clinical and Military Microscopy at the US Army Medical School. Reed and Carroll served together again on the US Army Board which pursued scientific investigation of infectious diseases in Cuba.

 

I'm always amazed at these coincidences. Even today, those two places are huge distances apart and what are the odds, I wonder...