Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Medicinsk Museion reopens this week

THE MUSEUM OPENS AGAIN

On Saturday 24 April, we will finally open the doors to our good and curious guests. Our staff is well on its way to sprucing up, putting up signs and getting ready for a safe and secure reopening.

Remember bandages and Coronapas.

Admission tickets must continue to be purchased in advance, and we will open ticket sales on Wednesday 21 April.

Buy admission tickets here.

// The museum re-opens April 24. Admission tickets must be purchased in advance. Please remember a face mask and your Corona passport.

What to do with the Morton Crania Collection?

What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved?

As one museum has pledged to return skulls held in an infamous collection, others, including the Smithsonian, are reckoning with their own holdings of African-American remains.

By Jennifer Schuessler

April 20, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/arts/design/museums-bones-smithsonian.html

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Morton Crania Collection to be partly repatriated

Penn Museum apologizes for its 'unethical' collection of human skulls and says it will repatriate remains of Black Philadelphians and others

Stephan Salisbury The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
Apr 12, 2021

https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/nation/penn-museum-apologizes-for-its-unethical-collection-of-human-skulls-and-says-it-will-repatriate/article_703c3728-5ca5-584f-a9fe-4af584df215f.html

Friday, April 16, 2021

Army medical history exhibit opens at Frontier Army Museum

Museum exhibit spotlights military medical milestones

Source: ftleavenworthlamp.com

Author: Katie Peterson

https://www.ftleavenworthlamp.com/community/2021/04/15/museum-exhibit-spotlights-military-medical-milestones/

To view the exhibit online with FAM OnCell, visit https://frontierarmymuseum.oncell.com/en/site-list-80713.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

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