A Repository for Bottled Monsters: July 2013

Monday, July 1, 2013

600th item uploaded to Medical Heritage Library by Navy Office of Medical History

https://archive.org/details/NavyMedicalNewsletter19621221

United States Navy Medical News Letter Vol. 40 No. 12, 21 December 1962

Circulating Now blog, from the NLM's History of Medicine Division

Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of
Medicine, I am pleased to invite you to the launch of our new blog,
Circulating Now, which is intended to encourage greater exploration and
discovery of one of the world's largest and most treasured history of
medicine collections.

Circulating Now will bring the NLM's diverse historical collections to
life in new and exciting ways for researchers, educators, students, and
anyone else who is interested in the history of medicine. Whether you are
familiar with NLM's historical collections, or you are discovering them
for the first time, Circulating Now will be an exciting and engaging
resource to bookmark, share, and discuss with other readers.

Kicking off Circulating Now will be a series of posts that draws on the
NLM's historical collections and associated others to reenact in a unique
way a tumultuous event in medical and American history which occurred 132
years ago this summer: the assassination of, and attempts to save, our
nation's twentieth President, James A. Garfield.

Come visit Circulating Now at:

http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/

Stephen J. Greenberg, MSLS, PhD
Coordinator of Public Services
History of Medicine Division
National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health
Department of Health and Human Services
Bethesda, MD

301-435-4995
greenbes@mail.nih.gov<mailto:greenbes@mail.nih.gov>

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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Monday, July 1, 2013

600th item uploaded to Medical Heritage Library by Navy Office of Medical History

Circulating Now blog, from the NLM's History of Medicine Division

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