A Repository for Bottled Monsters: New Zealand

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Letter of the Day: February 5

Cox Le
Army Agents Chary xLondon
5.2.95

The Curator
Dear Sir

I desire to apply to you as I am engaged on a N. Zd [New Zealand] book for any printed information or plates regarding 2 dried N.Z Heads I learn you have.

My informant by a curator of a museum out there.

This information I seek [?] is noted as
Int Bureau Ethnology No 4. 1886 Smithsonian Lw.

Should I apply there

Besides New Zealand war[es?] I have had S. African[.] I would like to know if I gave a good exchange in Zulus Lc Y J might offer for 2nd N. Z of yours.

I must ask you to excuse me if I trouble you[?] I shd [should] be pleased with any notice of this

I am
Yrs Respectfully

H.G. Robley

Friday, June 11, 2010

Letter of the Day: June 11

Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C., June 11 1878

Sir:

We have to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of “a tattooed head of a Maori, or New Zealander,” transferred to this Institution, where it originally formed part of the collection of the Wilkes Expedition.

Very truly yours,
Spencer F. Baird
Sect. S.I.

Dr. George A. Otis,
Curator Army Med 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

Pages

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Letter of the Day: February 5

Friday, June 11, 2010

Letter of the Day: June 11

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