A Repository for Bottled Monsters: New Mexico

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Letter of the Day: April 2

Curatorial Records: Numbered Correspondence 03022

April 2, 1898.

Mr. Frank J. Otis
Mescalera Agency New Mexico.

Dear Sir:

I have the pleasure of acknowledging the receipt of your letter of the 28th ult., in regard to the chick with two heads. Such monstrosities are not at all rare and have no commercial value, and as the Museum has already quite a collection of them, I beg to say that the specimen offered by you is declined with thanks.

Very respectfully,
Walter Reed
Surgeon, U.S. Army Curator.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Letter of the day: January 30

I have no idea what "This spaa is also cribriform..." but that's what the letter says.

Surgeon General’s Office
Washington City D.C.
Jany 30th 1866

Sir,

About 12th September 1865, there was received from you, from Santa Fé, a cranium which has been given the number 4385, in the surgical section of the Army Medical Museum. The specimen shows a discolored surface of six inches by four over the superior anterior portion of the frontal bone. This spaa is also cribriform – No history accompanied the case, and it has been suggested it was one in which scalping had been practiced without immediately fatal results. You are earnestly desired to transmit such notes of the matter as you may possess.

Very respectfully,
Your obedt. servant,
By order of the Surgeon General
[George A. Otis]
Surgeon & Bvt. Lt. Col, U.S. Vols. Curator, A.M. Museum

Bvt Major H.E. Brown,
Assistant Surgeon U.S. Army at Hart’s Island, N.Y.H. [New York Harbor]
Care of Medl. Dir. Dept East, New York

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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Saturday, April 2, 2011

Letter of the Day: April 2

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Letter of the day: January 30

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