A Repository for Bottled Monsters: August 2016

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Aug 20: Stanley Burns speaks at new Gettysburg PA medical museum

From: Stanley Burns

I will be giving the inaugural address at the opening of a new Civil War medical museum in Gettysburg, at the The Daniel Lady Farm. The farm and Barn was a Confederate staging area during the battle and now will be dedicated as part a new medical museum. I will be lecturing and also supervising an amputation. There will be re-enactors for various events.

The Daniel Lady farm on July 2, 1863 served as a staging area for Major General Edward Johnson's divisions of Confederate regiments for the attack on the Union Flank at Culps Hill. The farm was converted to a field hospital by July 3rd for seriously wounded Confederates who were then left at the hospital as the Confederates retreated south after the battle.

I will be lecturing on the amazing medical photographs of wounded soldiers taken by Dr Reed Brockway Bontecou, Surgeon-In-Charge of Harewood US Army General Hospital Washington DC, as well as my work as the on set medical consultant to PBS's Civil War drama, Mercy Street.

http://www.destinationgettysburg.com/event/details/10562

http://www.gbpa.org/Daniel-Lady-Farm.html

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

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Aug 20: Stanley Burns speaks at new Gettysburg PA medical museum

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

National Museum of Civil War Medicine criticized for logo

D.C. tourism guide rejects Frederick museum's ad containing Confederate Flag

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