A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Mutter Museum

Showing posts with label Mutter Museum. Show all posts

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Letter of the Day: November 14

Museum of the College of Physicians
Philadelphia Nov. 14 1868

Dear Sir

It would be a great convenience if you could now send on the specimen promised to the College in March last.

There is at present no work on hand and I am desirous of keeping my man employed in mounting preparations.

Very Truly
Th. Hewson Bache
Curator

Geo. A Otis MD
Asst Surgeon USA

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Letter of the Day: June 24 - Mutter Museum catalogue?

The Western Union Telegraph Company.

Received at Corcoran Building, S.E., Cor. 15^th and “F” Sts., Washington, D.C.

June 24, 1886

Dated Phila 24

To Dr. John S. Billings

Army Medical Museum

Wash

Could you favor Mutter Museum with manuscript or proof of your classification of specimens for our new catalogue. Guy Hinsdale

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Two medical museum references in today's New York Times Science section

The Mutter for "Bone, a Masterpiece of Elastic Strength," By NATALIE ANGIER, in which one can find out Mr. Eastlack had requested that his skeleton be preserved for scientific research, and today it can be seen at the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia — or rather, they can be seen. As the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi has observed in his book “Mutants,” Mr. Eastlack’s skeleton, with its “extra sheets, struts and pinnacles of bone,” amounts to “that of a 40-year-old man encased in another skeleton, but one that is inchoate and out of control.” I've seen his skeleton and it's very striking. Our museum has a skeleton of Peter Cluckey, a Spanish-American War veteran in which ALL of his joints fused, including his jaw, so he couldn't move or eat.

The Dittrick's Dissections book is featured again in "Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy," By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. April 28, 2009.

Monday, August 25, 2008

A collector's estate

Working in a medical museum means that you meet people with... different... ideas of collecting and hobbies. I never met John Lattimer, the focus of this article, but my late friend Gretchen Worden, curator of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia worked with him. For more on Lattimer, see "In a Father's Clutter, Historic Oddities," By KASSIE BRACKEN and ERIK OLSEN, New York Times August 21, 2008.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Yahoo on TV diseases

Yahoo's got a fun feature on whether or not TV diseases are fact or fiction. I've seen and enjoyed House, but probably not any of the other shows - it doesn't matter though. Disease of the week tv has been around for years.

Regarding slide 3 - FOP - you can see an example at the Mutter Museum.

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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