Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The "Holmes heart" has a special place among the 2,000 specimens in the collection of McGill's Maude Abbott Medical Museum, which opened its ...

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Excellent article on WW1 Chemical Corps experiments in DC

The Chemists' War

One hundred years after the end of World War I, the Army Corps of Engineers is still cleaning up the relics of experiments that helped develop chemical weapons to counter the Germans' gas attacks.

By Theo Emery

Nov. 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/chemical-weapons-world-war-1-armistice.html

Friday, November 2, 2018

Civil War specimens scanned from NMHM

Lab 3-D scans human skeletal remains dating back to the American Civil War

November 1, 2018 by Brian Mcneill, Virginia Commonwealth University

Friday, October 12, 2018

Wayne Meyers, leprosy specialist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, has passed away

The Washington Post ran an obituary for Dr. Meyers.

A 1993 oral history done for the Museum can be seen online.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

McGill Medical Museum featured in local paper

Restored museum unlocks McGill's medical history

McGill Tribune

The Maude Abbott Medical Museum provides visitors with insight into the rich history of medical studies at McGill as well as the rare opportunity to see ...

http://www.mcgilltribune.com/sci-tech/restored-museum-unlocks-mcgills-medical-history-091018/

Monday, October 1, 2018

Brain collection at India’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences

Visitors Can Touch Human Brains at This Indian Neuroscience Institute

It's like a petting zoo for organs.

by Maya Prabhu

September 21, 2018

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nimhans-brain-museum

Friday, September 21, 2018

Experience: I will be plastinated when I die

The challenges I face are immense. Suffering from Parkinson's disease is like practising dying

Gunther von Hagens

Fri 21 Sep 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/21/i-want-to-be-plastinated-when-i-die

Hearts, brains and bones: Visitors to new museum will 'come a little closer to death'

'We have virtually everything you can think of,' says pathologist Rick Fraser.

CBC Radio · September 18 2018

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/hearts-brains-and-bones-visitors-to-new-museum-will-come-a-little-closer-to-death-1.4828244

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

McGill University reopens medical museum

Bones, brains, bladders: McGill opens body parts museum to the public

Interactive tablets will offer insights on the specimens, and "we'll also be telling the story of grave-robbing."

Bill Brownstein, Montreal Gazette September 18, 2018

https://www.thesudburystar.com/opinion/columnists/bones-brains-bladders-mcgill-opens-body-parts-museum-to-the-public/wcm/180f1b63-a006-44ed-af75-9233ae6f38e1

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Facial reconstruction photos on NLM's blog

The National Museum of Health and Medicine also has thousands of these types of pictures.

Hidden Faces of WW1: Maxillofacial Portraits Preserved

August 2, 2018
https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2018/08/02/hidden-faces-of-ww1-maxillofacial-portraits-preserved/

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Katherine Akey. Ms. Akey is Adjunct Professor of Photography in the Corcoran School of the Arts at the George Washington University and Fellow in the Living Legacy of World War One project at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. She is also the line producer for the United States World War One Centennial Commission weekly WW1 Centennial News Podcast. Today she employs her considerable expertise to give us insight into a private and profound photographic collection of an American surgeon in the Great War, now held in the public trust at the National Library of Medicine.

Monday, July 23, 2018

July 23: Medical Museum Science Cafe: Confronting "Shell Shock": The American Experience during World War I

You are cordially invited to attend the following lecture to be held at the
National Museum of Health and Medicine, 2500 Linden Lane, Silver Spring, MD
20910, on Tuesday, July 24, 2018, from 6-7 p.m.

Confronting "Shell Shock": The American Experience during World War I

During World War I, war-related psychological trauma was considered a new
manifestation of psychiatric breakdown. American military medicine was
challenged by establishing an entirely new medical specialty while treating
the stricken service member and assuring an anxious public back home. Explore
American psychiatrists' understanding of "shell shock" and what lessons they
did – or did not – learn from their experience. Presenter: Rachel Levandoski
is an historian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office
and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

FREE! Open to the public. No RSVP required.

Andrea Schierkolk
NMHM Public Programs
andrea.k.schierkolk.civ@mail.mil
301-319-3303

Friday, June 1, 2018

NMHM archives cited in Washington City Paper article

LGBTQ People Suffered Traumatic Treatments at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Mentally Ill[in print as Asylum Seekers].

"This is coercive federal psychiatry. ...This whole idea of LGBT Americans being broken and in need of a cure—religious or psychiatric—is still a pernicious, damaging lie."

Andrew Giambrone

June 1, 2018, p. 8-11
https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/21007233/independent-scholars-uncover-the-traumatic-treatments-lgbtq-people-suffered-at-st-elizabeths

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

NY Times photo essay on medical tools

Photos of Gynecological Tools From Centuries Past

By Remy Tumin

April 16, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/lens/historical-gynecological-tools.html

And the photographer's website is : https://www.lindseybeal.com/parturition/

Thanks to Alan Hawk of the NMHM who pointed out the article.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Mutter Museum featured in Washington Post

In Philadelphia, a medical museum puts the human body on display

By Liz Langley
Washington Post February 8 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/in-philadelphia-a-medical-museum-puts-the-human-body-on-display/2018/02/07/5bfb0eaa-d45a-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.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.

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