Our (possibly) most viewed Flickr image

We've had almost 1200 views on this photo, which may be the most-viewed of our 500 or so.

CP1855. The caption is: "Amputation of left thigh. [Image is reversed.] CPL Edward Scott, 10th U.S. Calvary. Injured May 3, 1886 at the Battle of Sierra Pinita, Mexico and treated by Dr. Paul R. Brown. Baker & Johnson Photos studio. "

New finding aid for Haymaker collection

Dr. Webb Haymaker was a neuropathologist at AFIP. We have a small collection of his papers and just put online a finding aid for them.

Medical trade literature finding aid online

We've finally had our database of medical trade literature (ie advertisements) converted to html and you can see a listing of items for this collection at the following URL. It's already obsolete as we continue to add material on a weekly basis. This isn't the best solution, but it will give a researcher a rough idea of what type of material we have and it's certainly more up-to-date than the 20-year old book that listed them, The Finest Instruments Ever Made. As we scan more of these catalogues, links to the scans will be added too.

OHA 168

General Medical Products Information Collection, ca. 1815-present
90 cubic feet, 144 boxes.
Finding aid available, arranged, active, unrestricted.
Artificial collection of product information, primarily advertisements and trade literature, on medical equipment, prosthetics, and pharmaceuticals. Arranged by manufacturer. Item-level finding aid.

More downloadable books on Internet Archive

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 8: Field Operations (1925)

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. (1861-1865) Part I. Volume I. Medical History. (1st Medical volume) (1870)

Autopsy of President Kennedy (1965) by Pierre Finck, AFIP. From the Blumberg collection.

A Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry (1947), Coal Mines Administration, US Department of the Interior. From the Vorwald collection.

New book donated to museum

Civil War Museum Treasures: Outstanding Artifacts and the Stories Behind Them by Kenneth D. Alford, McFarland 2008. Includes a brief mention of the bullet that killed Lincoln and a picture on p. 25.

3 new scanned books on Internet Archive

Free for downloading, but very large files.

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 7: Training (1926) - this has a section on the Army Medical School which spun off of the Army Medical Museum, and in turn spun off the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, but whose role has been taken up by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda.

A Catalogue of Surgeons' Instruments, Air and Water Beds, Pillows, and Cushions, Bandages, Trusses, Elastic Stockings, Inhalers, Galvanic Apparatus, and Other Appliances Used by the Medical Profession, Maw and Son, 1866

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. Part III, Volume II. (3rd Surgical volume)

Ephemera - whadya do with it?

So what do you notice when you look at this box? It's a box of crackers? It's low fat? It's pink? It's a big breast cancer awareness advertisement?

The last is what I noticed. This is the type of ephemera which usually doesn't get saved, but is darn useful for doing exhibits. The question about where to file it then arises of course. We dropped this in a folder on Breast Cancer and didn't catalogue it in our General Medical Products Information trade literature collection.

New book donated to museum

We just received The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy by E. Chaves-Carballo, Sussex Academic Press, 2007.

Dr. Chaves-Carballo used our collection a little bit to write this biography of the pathologist at Panama's Gorgas Hospital. We have Darling's pathological reports and autopsies of the hospital in OHA 177 Gorgas Hospital Autopsies and Pathology Reports, 1900s-1970s. Darling discovered the fungal disease Histoplasmosis (although according to the book he thought it was a protozoa) and a picture from us of a 1905 autopsy report of the first case is on p. 66. The autopsy records also showed how many cases of malaria (called estivo-autumnal fever) was killing people.

Some medical trade literature with gender issues

I put up on Flickr 4 scans from 3 pieces of medical trade literature responding to a posting on another blog about gender and advertising. Here they are:

duJur-Amsco's' "Communication Capsules for Inner Space - the new... Stenorette dictating systems" cover. Circa 1961. Accession #2002.0042.

"Essence of Womanhood" Published by Personal Products Corporation, Milltown, New Jersey. Makers of MODESS TAMPONS. Circa 1960. Accession #2002.0042.

"Essence of Womanhood" doctor's ordering form. Published by Personal Products Corporation, Milltown, New Jersey. Makers of MODESS TAMPONS. Circa 1960. Accession #2002.0042.

"Lady, your anxiety is showing (over a coexisting depression)" folder cover for "The Nervous System anatomical illustrations" published by Merck, Sharp and Dohme, West Point, PA. Circa. 1969. Advertises Triavil "a broad-spectrum psychotheraputic agent for the management of outpatients and hospitalized patients with psychoses or neurosis characterized by mixtures of anxiety or agitation with symptoms of depression..." Accession #2002.0042.

Trade literature and advertising can be fascinating.

Flickr picture viewing, OR What Boing-Boing meant to us

Last month, without us knowing it, Boing-Boing ran a bit about our Flickr sites (links in sidebar). This is what happened to traffic on the 3 sites we have (after we fill the free 200 pictures, we start a new one). This was all a surprise to us because we can't access BoingBoing either.

1/18/2008: 14,386 views, accounts 1 & 2 combined for the previous year and a half.

1/25/2008:

At about 3:30 pm:

1: 18,435 views
2: 5,442 views
3: about 660
-------------
24,537

At 4 pm:
1: 18,896
2: 5,705 - 3 minutes later - 5731
3: 930
-------------
25,557

4:11 pm:

1: 19,030
2: 5,877

6:00 pm:

1: 20,476
2: 6,731
3: 1,230

7:15 pm:

1: 21,231
2: 7,292
3: 1,379

1/26/2008

11:00 am:

1: 25,101
2: 9,752
3: 2,120

9:00 pm:

1: 26,905
2: 10,844
3: 2,439

1/27/2008

Noon:

1: 28,686
2: 11,803
3: 2,738

1/28/2008

9:30 am:

1: 30,589
2: 12,706
3: 3,045
---------
46,340

2/6/2008: 56,232 combined views

Midday, Bill Koslosky called me and did a brief interview so I had a clue what was going on. We could tell that people were suddenly accessing the sites, but had no idea why.

Amazing, isn't it? They might have gotten our name wrong, but boy did they do some good linking for us. We're still putting pictures up daily, and waiting to hear back from Flickr about joining their Commons project so check out the links on the bar on the right.

Museum publication scans online

We're scanning tens of thousands of photographs each year, but also a few books. Here are links to ones that we began putting up on the Internet Archive last week. These are very large files - hundreds of megabytes - and there's a lot of reading that can be done here.

WW1 Medical History:

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 1: The Surgeon General's Office (1923)

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 2: Administration American Expeditionary Forces (1927)

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 3: Finance and Supply (1928)

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 4: Activities Concerning Mobilization Camps and Ports of Embarkation (1928)

The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War volume 5: Military Hospitals in the United States (1923)

Instrument Catalogues:

An Illustrated Description of First-Class Achromatic Microscopes, Apparatus, Specimens, etc., Miller Brothers, 1879

Museum History:

The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology - Its First Century by Robert S. Henry (1962)

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion was written by the Museum's curators, principally George Otis and J.J. Woodward. Not our scans, but we'll be uploading ours as well, including the missing 3rd Surgical volume -

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, (1861-65) Medical 1

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, (1861-65) Medical 2

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, (1861-65) Medical 3

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, (1861-65) Surgical 1

The medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion, (1861-65) Surgical 2

Another favorite photo

Here's another photo from the MAMAS collection (introduced below). Paperwork that came with the photo didn't have a name for this creature other than "mooch bug." I think, as a librarian/archivist, that it's a perfectly descriptive term, even if you wouldn't find in the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

Introduction to one of our collections

Hi. I'm Kathleen Stocker, an assistant archivist at the museum. I've been there about 2 1/2 years, fresh out of graduate school and my first foray into the archives world. I love my job.

I was hired to begin processing images for a massive digitization project. The first collection I worked on is known as MAMAS (Museum and Medical Arts Services). MAMAS photographers were sent out by the Medical Museum during WW2 to document medical and surgical cases and, when things got slow, they shot a lot of other things like scenery and calmer activities. Of the hundreds of thousands of images we've digitized in the last couple of years, here is my favorite:



This is the only information we have about this picture: "C-46 air evacuation from Manila, Philippine Islands."

I think the photo's a classic. It portrays such a feeling of calm and control. The soldiers are obviously all wounded, but they're in safe hands now, maybe on their way home. Mundane activities occupy the sergeant at the desk. And the nurse looks like a 1940s movie star, with just enough light on her face to make her the real subject of this photo, an elegant emblem of caring and competence.

Book review out

The staff writes regularly for various publications and this seems like a good place to mention them. I got a copy of something I wrote in the mail a couple of days ago - “Book Review: Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History and the American Civil War. By Lisa A. Long,” Journal of Southern History 74:1 (February 2008), 196-197.

We're also all writing a regular column for Scientist Magazine, edited by the Museum's Director Dr. Adrianne Noe and I'll try to get a list of those up.

Letter on "A Family Album is One for the History Books"

At the beginning of the year, the New York Times ran an article that caught our archivist eyes:

A Family Album Is One for the History Books
By ROBERTA HERSHENSON
Published: January 1, 2008
Photographs of William Howard Taft’s mission to the Far East, now on view at the Nippon Club, were found in an unlikely place.

I recalled that we had similar photos of Taft donated fairly recently, so Kathleen checked the collection and found them. We sent a letter to the Times that it didn't run, so here it is now for the Taft fans.

To the editor:

We read with interest "A Family Album is One for the History Books," (January 1), of the Harry Fowler Woods scrapbooks containing photographs from the 1905 return to the Philippines of William Howard Taft. The National Museum of Health and Medicine archives also has photographs of Taft in the Philippines, taken at his 1901 inauguration as the first Governor-General of the islands. Osborn also took pictures of the Filipino memorial services for the assassinated President McKinley, as well as Douglas MacArthur's father, military governor Arthur MacArthur. The photographs are part of a recent donation, the William S. Osborn Collection of scrapbooks, diaries, and dozens of letters that Osborn created during his service as a hospital corpsman in the wake of the Spanish-American War, as well as items from later in his career as a physician in Tennessee and Wisconsin. Many of Osborn's pictures were cyanotypes, which remain a lovely cool shade of blue. The scrapbook can be viewed by appointment.

Regards,

Kathleen Stocker & Michael Rhode
Archivists, National Museum of Health and Medicine Washington, DC

Technology left behind, or an Intro to Our Neat Photos

Once upon a time, when one used horses in battle, one had to protect them as well. Germany's use of poison gas in World War 1 meant that one had to have a gas mask for one's horse too. This is Reeve 17408 and can be downloaded full-size from our third Flickr site.