A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Medical museum articles online

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Medical museum articles online

My colleagues Sam Alberti and Simon Chaplin have articles in the online journal museum & society This should be a good issue.

Special issue: Constructing Nature Behind the Glass edited by Samuel J. M.M. Alberti and Christopher Whitehead

contents

Constructing nature behind the glass
Samuel J.M.M. Alberti

Repair work: surfacing the geographies of dead animals
Merle Patchett and Kate Foster

The matter and meaning of museum taxidermy
Rachel Poliquin

Nature dissected, or dissection naturalized? The case of John Hunter’s museum
Simon Chaplin

From natural history to science: display and the transformation of American museums of science and nature
Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain

Rethinking the value of biological specimens: laboratories, museums and the Barcoding of Life Initiative
Rebecca Ellis

Book Reviews

Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums Paula Findlen

Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display Julia Adams

No comments:

Post a Comment

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

Pages

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Medical museum articles online

No comments:

Get new posts by email:

FeedBurner FeedCount

Google analytics