A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Letter on "A Family Album is One for the History Books"

Friday, February 22, 2008

Letter on "A Family Album is One for the History Books"

At the beginning of the year, the New York Times ran an article that caught our archivist eyes:

A Family Album Is One for the History Books
By ROBERTA HERSHENSON
Published: January 1, 2008
Photographs of William Howard Taft’s mission to the Far East, now on view at the Nippon Club, were found in an unlikely place.

I recalled that we had similar photos of Taft donated fairly recently, so Kathleen checked the collection and found them. We sent a letter to the Times that it didn't run, so here it is now for the Taft fans.

To the editor:

We read with interest "A Family Album is One for the History Books," (January 1), of the Harry Fowler Woods scrapbooks containing photographs from the 1905 return to the Philippines of William Howard Taft. The National Museum of Health and Medicine archives also has photographs of Taft in the Philippines, taken at his 1901 inauguration as the first Governor-General of the islands. Osborn also took pictures of the Filipino memorial services for the assassinated President McKinley, as well as Douglas MacArthur's father, military governor Arthur MacArthur. The photographs are part of a recent donation, the William S. Osborn Collection of scrapbooks, diaries, and dozens of letters that Osborn created during his service as a hospital corpsman in the wake of the Spanish-American War, as well as items from later in his career as a physician in Tennessee and Wisconsin. Many of Osborn's pictures were cyanotypes, which remain a lovely cool shade of blue. The scrapbook can be viewed by appointment.

Regards,

Kathleen Stocker & Michael Rhode
Archivists, National Museum of Health and Medicine Washington, DC

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Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

A Repository for Bottled Monsters

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Friday, February 22, 2008

Letter on "A Family Album is One for the History Books"

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