Pages

Showing posts with label Otis Historical Archives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Otis Historical Archives. Show all posts

Thursday, October 30, 2008

A day in the life...

Today Walter Reed was having a disaster planning episode which involved locking down the AFIP building so all of the collections staff went out to the warehouse. I was running a bit behind because yesterday a curator at the National Gallery of Art called to say that while the Gallery found something interesting while a conservator was cleaning Thomas Eakins' painting of the Museum's first curator John Hill Brinton. The partially-cleaned painting has what was thought to be a curtain in the upper left corner, but instead appears to be a flag or heraldic device. They had hoped it would be a medical one that I'd recognize, but I was in the dark... More research to follow, but the painting should look great when it's finished in a few months.

Up at the warehouse, Kathleen and I inventoried boxes of early 20th century journals that the AFIP library had transferred to us years ago, and then helped restack Neuroanatomical's Yakovlev Collection's library. Kathleen also had been editing a finding aid of the James Moore Ball Ophthalmic Museum collection which is a very large group of material on eyes and vision from the turn of the 19th century. I had to leave early to go to another building to get my warehouse ID card renewed and then popped back into the museum to update location in our database. Look for the Ball finding aid to show up on our main website soon.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

On retirement and a job well done


One of the Archives staff is retiring.

Tom Gaskins has been part of the Museum staff since 2004, but he was a mainstay of AFIP for years longer than that. He's been with the Institute for seventeen years, joining us from the Federal Records Center in Suitland. Tom singlehandedly ran the fifty-year old Medical Illustration Service Library of 3,000 boxes of hundreds of thousands of photographs. The library was the Department of Defense's official medical photograph repository from 1949 on. He inherited all of the responsibility for the Library as staff left and weren't replaced.

Tom's sense of duty and responsibility preserved the Library, through at least two moves, and in spite of disinterest or worse on the part of some. As well as safeguarding the material, Tom kept it being used. A photo request given to Tom was done quickly and well.

Tom joined us due to the Information Manufacturing Corporation scanning project. The initial plan was to do a lo-res scan of the Library and then discard the originals. Fortunately we were able to work around that and add the collection to the Museum. There's overseas photos from World War II, extinct diseases, and Vietnam helicopter dustoffs being found and scanned. Sometime soon we hope to show thousands of pictures online - at the moment you can see a few hundred at our Flickr links.

Tom's been an integral part of making possible hundreds of thousands of scans - 350,000 this year alone. His knowledge of the collection and willingness to share it has been the only thing that's enabled us to make sense of the staggering amount of pictures. Without Tom, the project wouldn't have gotten off the ground. He's also done work in the Archives, such as scanning all of our Civil War photographs.

While I have hopes of filling Tom's position, we certainly won't be able to replace him.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

A new motto for the archives

I saw Brian of anatomical collections this morning as we swapped some folders of Civil War soldiers files that a researcher had asked to see. He popped back into archives about an hour later, surprising me as I hadn't expected to see him again on a day when he had visitors coming in and I had a long Institutional Review Board meeting (21 straight hours! No lie!) assigned to me. I queried him on his reappearance in the Archives and he said "There's too many secrets hidden here". That's our new motto.

Monday, August 25, 2008

A new (tiny) collection in the archives


We recently acquired the Welling Collection – a set of photographs and a PowerPoint presentation – from Col. David Welling, M.D. (retired). Dr. Welling was part of the Critical Care Air Transport Team (CCATT) that was deployed to Yemen to treat and evacuate US sailors injured in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. The team was awarded the McKay Trophy, an annual award that the National Aeronautic Association gives to the Air Force person, crew, or organization that makes the most meritorious flight of the year. Dr. Welling said, “The mission was the highlight of my 30-year career.”

The photo above is from Dr. Welling. It shows patients and medical staff inside one of the planes that evacuated the wounded from Yemen to Germany.

Now, a behind-the-scenes peek at the decision about how to handle this collection. We could fold it into the MIS (Medical Illustration Service) collection or make it a collection all its own. The MIS collection is a kind of generic bunch of stuff (which is not to say there’s nothing interesting there – there is plenty interesting) but it’s also 4000 boxes. Bankers’ boxes. It would be easy to “lose” something in there. Plus, the Welling collection was born digital. The only hard copy of anything we had was the disc he sent to us and the emails about it that we printed out.

The other way to treat it – as a collection of its own – would be a consideration even though it’s a one-folder collection. Kind of small for a whole collection, but that’s how we decided to treat it. This is important to us because we have very little contemporary material and we really want to be able to put our hands on it when we need it. By making it a collection we automatically make it a line item on our shelf list (the inventory of our collections) and so it remains higher in visibility of the materials we maintain. We copied the disc Dr. Welling sent us onto a gold archival disc and printed out the photos and the PowerPoint, and all of it will go into a box that holds other small collections right here in the archives.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A day in the life...

Today began with nothing much on the calendar, but Bruce from the Department of Veterinary Pathology (VetPath) stopped by to say that Dr. John King was arriving with his donation of 35mm slides for the museum. Dr. King and Cornell University had been digitizing the collection as Dr. John M. King's Necropsy Show & Tell and posting them online. They got about 1/2 done, but Dr. King donated all the slides to us and we're going to finish the scanning job.

Dr. King was in his early 80s, and lively and full of interesting stories about veterinary pathology and how there are some controversies in the field like the bursting aortas of racehorses (which I'd never heard of - the competing theories are high blood pressure v. King's compressing the chest when collapsing or mating). He's also a collector of veterinary instruments and brought down some for us.

When I mentioned this collection coming in, I didn't tell you readers that it's 48,000 35mm slides in 108 notebooks, arranged by animal and pathology (ie herpes, heart disease, liver failure). Cool, huh?

Midday was a tour for Lauren the intern's mom. It's always fun to take people that are interested on a tour. Lauren's done a great job for us this summer, working most recently on updating the Vorwald Collection finding aid and adding more material into the trade literature collection (ie advertising), General Medical Products Information Collection.

Later on in the day, we got a call from people doing renovations in the area the AFIP director works in and so we removed paintings of the former directors for safe storage while the work goes on.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

The Vietnam Center and Archive Blog

The following post came through an archives listserve today. I took a quick look - it seems like a good resource. In the museum, we actually have a massive amount of Vietnam War medical records, but most are not yet processed. We've got hundreds of hours of video footage from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research's film team for example, but no inventory of it. The Wound Data Munition Effectiveness Study (WDMET) was recently transferred back to us from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and we're in the process of digitizing over the 10,000 records of wounds suffered, usually by American soldiers, during the war.

The Vietnam Center and Archive Blog

The Vietnam Center and Archive is proud to announce the launch of our new blog located at http://www.vietnamarchive.blogspot.com. This blog will be used for a variety of topics and will be updated often by members of the Vietnam Center and Archive staff.

Blog topics will include: Vietnam Center and Archive news and updates, information about the Oral History Program, updates concerning the Virtual Vietnam Archive and the physical archive, interesting items from our holdings, website updates, and reference resources and outreach. We hope this new blog will both be a way to keep people informed about the progress of the Vietnam Center and Archive, as well as provide a valuable research tool. Several articles have already been posted, so
please visit our blog and leave us your comments.


A link to our blog is also located in the top right corner of our website [http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu].

Mary McLain Saffell, C.A.
Associate Director, Archivist

The Vietnam Center and Archive
Texas Tech University
Special Collections Library, Room 108
Lubbock, Texas 79409-1041

A day in the life...


Turned on the computer this morning and saw the screen above and this email...

Effective immediately, when you log onto the AFIP network you will see a New DOD Consent Banner and User Agreement. Please take a moment to read this banner, by clicking ok you are in agreement with the consent banner.

The new warning and consent banner establishes that there is no expectation of PRIVACY when using DOD Information systems and all use of the Information system is subject to searches, audits, seizure, and monitoring.

In the past the helpdesk personnel have waited many hours to implement needed updates for security and software. This new banner makes it clear that when such needs arise the systems can be accessed by the personnel without prior notification. However, we will continue to make courtesy calls unless restricted by deadlines.

If for some reason you are not in agreement with the new banner and user agreement you will NOT have access to Information systems within the organization. This is a directive of MEDCOM, which means we MUST follow it.
I can hardly contain my enthusiasm for seeing that message every day, or working for people whose level of trust mandates it.

Later in the afternoon, Kathleen and I went down to the Borden Institute, which publishes the Textbook of Military Medicine series, to work on a picture book on the history of Walter Reed medical center. With the other editors, we culled some of the photos from the 'teens and twenties chapters as we had too many.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

A day in the life...

An interesting research request came in through the Radiology department today. Someone's looking for fluoroscope burns. So far I haven't turned up exactly what they want, which is modern color shots, but check out this photo of a wax model that I did find:

Reeve36721waxmodel_x-rayburn

The caption reads: Breast. Burn, X-Ray. Wax model. No. 92 X-ray burn involving right breast and axilla. Necrosis of tissue producing sloughing ulceration, the bottom of which includes pleura and lung tissue. X-ray treatment was applied for carcinoma of the breast. Colored, woman, age 35 years. Army Medical Museum model prepared by Dr. J.F. Wallis.

Wallis means that it was done during World War 1, because that's when he was on the staff. We might still have this model in historical collections, but that department was working at the warehouse today, and thus missed the coffee and cake that we had to celebrate the Museum's birthday.

So how does one find something in the Archives? We've got an internal database (or fifty) that you can access a derivative of at our Guide to Collections. With the help of contract Archivists from the Information Manufacturing Company, we're scanning tens of thousands of images per year and uploading them into an internal database, only available to our staff now, but eventually we'll open it to a wider audience. And some of the finding something is me or one of the other archivists knowing where something is because we put it away a decade ago or so.

Friday, May 16, 2008

A day in the life...

I've been realizing this blog is drifting towards aiming squarely at history of medicine types, so I'm going to try to wrench it in a slightly different direction. Here's how I spent part of my day as an archivist today.

I was walking through the exhibit floor this morning and heard voices coming out of our Human Body, Human Being exhibit. The exhibit flooded over the weekend when Washington got 5-7 inches of rain. That side of the museum is built into a hill and has been flooding off and on for about a decade now. On the past Monday, the exhibits and collection staff had dismantled the exhibits against the wall - on the urinary system and bones - and moved them out of the way so the building engineers could look up and say, "yup, it's leaking water."

The whole hall (the Anatifacts area in this map), which is about 1/4 of the exhibit floor, was closed all week, but this morning Steve Hill, head of our exhibits staff, Tim Clarke Jr, our public relations guy and Beth Eubanks, our registrar, were muscling some of the exhibit cases into a new configuration about 10 feet from the wall. I lent a hand and helped and a little after opening the cases were in place. Brian Spatola, collections manager of anatomical collections, brought the specimens back from storage and the four of them put the display back together. Meanwhile...

...I was leading a tour of people who had bought a silent auction benefit behind-the-scenes tour. Our former PR guy Steven Solomon had started these a few years back. We started in historical collections where collections manager Alan Hawk pulled out a bunch of surgical kits dating from the Civil War until World War II, and then showed them wax and plaster models of facial reconstruction surgery from the same time period. Anatomical curator Franklin Damann was giving a tour of his own in anatomical collections, so we swapped groups and he showed my group Civil War amputated femurs, Ham the space chimp, plastinated organs and a quick glance into the wet tissue room where specimens are stored in bottles of formalin.

We combined the two groups and neuroanatomical collections manager Archie Fobbs displayed some of our brain slides. Instead of making a microscope slide, his predecessors sectioned and mounted slices of whole brains and you can see stroke or tumor damage. I think the high point for the group was when Archie opened up his demo tub of a brain preserved in alcohol and let people handle it. Nobody was in the Human Developmental Anatomy Center, so I did a quick riff on scanning slides of embryos which had been collected 100 years ago to make first wax or plaster models of organ systems. These are now being scanned with the models made in the computer. Finally I gave my standard tour of the archives, including a letter signed by Walter Reed, a 1917 doctor's diary, a revised confidential asbestosis report for Johns Manville from 1949, a lantern slide photograph of a survivor from Hiroshima, an album of the museum's Civil War Surgical Photographs and some of our trade lit advertising material.

So there's a good bit of a typical day. If there's interest in more posts like this, comment below please.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

the week on flickr - Korean war body armor, Civil War and mosquitoes

April 4th:

Reeve60839
Emergency encephalitis laboratory. Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. (Major Cornell, Simmons and Sergeant Rhodes.) [The volunteer has put his arm in a screened cage to be bitten by mosquitoes. Scene. Laboratories. Military camps.]

KWB53-2511-49
Armored Vest Number 329 worn by Private 1st Class Willie Tufts, US 52077771, with bullet holes circled and marked 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Company E, 7th Regiment. Front view. 04/26/1952. [Korean War]

KWB53-2511-41
Captain Robert Bessey, Jr. (Cincinnati, OH), Infantry member of the Body Armor Team I, Company 15, Infantry Regiment, 30 Division, points to fragment hole in vest worn by Private Edward Schallack (4905 N. 36 St., Milwaukee, WI) who wore the vest on patrol. 04/24/1952. [Korean War]

KWB53-2511-171
Private 1st Class Leo Curran, Jr., 46 1/2 Allen Street, Hudson, NY. E Company, 7th Regiment, 3rd Division. Was hit in back with fragment while wearing body armor vest on patrol. No penetration. 04/18/1952. [Korean War]

April 1st:

CP 0918
"Gunshot wound of hip." Private William W. Wrightman, Co. L, 2nd New York Heavy Artillery. Wounded at Petersburg, VA on March 31, 1865. Treated by Reed Bontecou at Harewood Hospital.[Civil War]

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Body armor article noted in passing

This article raised a few thoughts about the Museum and the Pathology Institute - "Contracts for Body Armor Filled Without Initial Tests: Inspections Skipped in 13 Of 28 Deals, Report Finds," By Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, April 3, 2008; Page D01.

"Why?" you say.

Don't worry, we're not producing armor. However over the years, the AFIP has helped evaluate armor. We've got hundreds of pictures of used (unfortunately) body armor from the Korean War in the Archives, and several actual pieces on display now on the Museum floor. Also, the AFIP currently runs the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner which is responsible for investigating military deaths and performs autopsies that can suggest the protection that the armor did or did not afford.

And we've got a really cool piece of armor from the Civil War that didn't work at all. It's got a bullet hole right through the breastplate. Whoops. (It's not on display now, but there is a photo of it in the lobby).

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Another Civil War upload to the Internet Archive

Today we uploaded anther book to the Internet Archive, but instead of a text, this one is a photograph album. Given to Frances Pleasants by wounded soldiers she cared for during the Civil War in Germantown, Pennsylvania, it holds photographs, tintypes, and cartes-de-visite, as well as newspaper clippings.Pleasants 84

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Library of Congress' new AV facility

This article, "Projecting the Future Needs of Preservation," By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, March 30, 2008; Page M14, is an interesting look at the Library of Congress' new AV facility. Of course, there are millions of films and records (I'd guess) that the LoC doesn't have and that the rest of us don't have the time nor money to preserve. At the Museum, we transferred our World War 2 propaganda films to the Library about a decade and a half ago - they weren't medical, and people would get better use of them at the Library. However, we kept a couple of thousand medical ones, which were reinforced by a couple of thousand videotapes from Walter Reed's tv branch (aka WRAMC-TV), and then with another 4000 from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research's (WRAIR) collection. The ones from WRAIR are particularly interesting as they had teams of sixty people in Vietnam during the war. So now the Museum's sitting on about 8000 films and videos. We mounted a partial-finding aid on the web earlier this year which ended up being fifteen pages anyway, but can't play most of this material so users have to pay for duplication at the beginning.

the week in flickr

Last week's pictures posted on flickr -

March 28th:

SP32 small"Shell Wound of Face." Pvt. William H. Nims, Co. D, 61st New York Volunteers, wounded at Petersburg, VA.

sp18 small"Penetrating gunshot would of the thorax and abdomen. A round musket ball having entered the left pleural cavity, passed through the diaphragm, and thence into some part of the intestinal canal. Recovery." Capt. Robert Stolpe, Co. A, 29th New York, wounded at battle of Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863. Artwork by E. Stauch.

AMM 464"Doing Cure in Kiosk, 16* below Zero." A free tuberculosis clinic in White Haven, Pennsylvania. Probably early 20th century.

March 27th:
WRAIR-KW240Unloading wounded from helicopter. Attendant holds IV [intravenous therapy] for patients. [First aid. Stretchers. Transfusions. Transport of sick and wounded.] Korean War. Photo from Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

sc355450The operation of a new litter designed to be attached to Bell helicopters used in air evacuation of the wounded from the front lines. The litter was designed by Captain Sebourn. [Transport of sick and wounded. Evacuations. Aircraft.] Korean War.

CP 1563"Army Medical Wagon"

CP 1043 - Field Day"Field Day". Amputations at Harewood Hospital in Washington, DC. Photograph from Reed Bontecou.


March 25th:

CP 0907 150dpi"Amputation of Forearm". Pvt. John Murphy, Co. K, 37 Massachusetts Volunteers. Wounded at Battle of Harper's Farm, VA on April 6, 1865. Treated by Dr. Reed Bontecou at Harewood Hospital, Washington, DC who had the photograph taken.

MAMAS E44-78-35"This is no horror picture for these are Good Japs, sinister minions of Tojo who were caught in a murderous cross fire of machine guns and rifle bullets as they attempted to make one last [fanatical] break through [our] lines at Tanapag Harbor, Saipan Island, on July 7th. This picture will supply the warlords of Japan a rough idea of what lies ahead and serve to remind them that the road to Tokyo is becoming a pretty un-healthy place for Tojo-san and his warriors." W-CPA-44-6755 July Laudansky. World War 2. 10/1/1944.

See a discussion of this picture and caption.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Pushing our pictures

Here's some stats from the morning for our ongoing Flickr experiment in Otis Historical Archives - we've got 3 free accounts -

1 - 40831
2 - 20428
3 - 8657

69916!

The web is working for us in getting our material out to new viewers. We've asked to join Flickr's Commons, but haven't heard back yet, but stay tuned for more Flickr news.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Graduate Student Symposium 2 May 2008

LIVE FROM THE Washington Society for the History of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, and the Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health:

Graduate Student Symposium 2 May 2008
8:30 am - 5:00 pm
FREE to REGISTRANTS

Lister Hill Visitors Center
National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike, Bldg. 38A
Lunch, refreshments, snacks provided.
Registration: email Judy Chelnick chelnickj@si.edu
NIH directions, access: www.nlm.nih.gov/about/visitor.html

Plenary speaker
Angela N.H. Creager
Department of History
Program in the History of Science
Princeton University

PROGRAM
8.30-9.00 Coffee

9.00 -9.15 Introductions
David Cantor, President, Washington Society for the History of Medicine.
Elizabeth Fee, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
Robert Martensen, Chief, Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health.

9.15-10.15 Plenary
Angela N.H. Creager, Dept of History & Program in the History of Science, Princeton University.
Artificial Radioisotopes in Biomedicine, 1935-1955: From Gift Exchange to Commodification in the Atomic Age.

10.15–10.30 Coffee

10.30-12.15 What we’re working on. Why we’re interested. How things have changed since the last Graduate Student Symposium
A chance for all of us, graduate students and historians working in the field, to talk informally about our research projects, interests, theoretical frames, methods, etc.
Format: 5-10 minutes per participant (including discussion).
Up to 3 slides on memory stick allowed.

12.15-1.15 Lunch

1.15-2.45 Publishing Your Research
What do publishers/journals want? What not to do. How to write a good book proposal.
Mary E. Fissell, Editor, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Randall M. Packard, Editor, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Jacqueline Wehmueller, Executive Editor, the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robert Martensen, Chief, Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health.

2.45-3.15 Coffee

3.15-5.00 Archival Research
A discussion about the problems of archival research from the points of view of archivists, curators, and historians.
Paul Theerman, Head, Images and Archives, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
Michael Rhode, Chief Archivist, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC.
John Swann, Historian, FDA History Office, Rockville, Maryland.

5.00 Retire to the Rock-Bottom Brewery, Bethesda.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Nationalism, racism or a time that tried men's souls?

Here's a picture from the MAMAS collection that Kathleen ran across today:


Unpleasant, but typical of war photography, right?

Now here's the picture with the caption scanned in:
MAMAS E44-78-35

The caption reads, "This is no horror picture for these are Good Japs, sinister minions of Tojo who were caught in a murderous cross fire of machine guns and rifle bullets as they attempted to make one last [fanatical] break through [our] lines at Tanapag Harbor, Saipan Island, on July 7th. This picture will supply the warlords of Japan a rough idea of what lies ahead and serve to remind them that the road to Tokyo is becoming a pretty un-healthy place for Tojo-san and his warriors." W-CPA-44-6755 July Laudansky. 10/1/1944.

As a policy, we use the caption that the picture comes with, although we'll add additional information in brackets if necessary. This caption? It's unpleasant, but it's probably not propaganda as it was never meant to be seen except by the Museum staff who received it. Unfortunately Mr. Laudansky was almost certainly on Saipan taking photographs when these Japanese soldiers attacked (to the last man), so I think we can understand this caption as an expression of something more than either nationalism or racism too. I'd like to hope that we as a society have moved beyond some things, but if I was in Laudansky's shoes, I have no idea what I'd write. I know I'd have been terrified though.

Although in our numbering series for the Museum & Medical Arts Service, I think this photograph is a re-photograph of by MAMAS staff of Luadansky's picture for the Central Pacific Area Signal Corps group.

Friday, March 21, 2008

A Civil War plastic surgery article I helped on

I just ran across this - "The first civil war photographs of soldiers with facial wounds," Journal of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Springer New York, ISSN 0364-216X (Print) 1432-5241 (Online), Volume 19, Number 3 / May, 1995. This was largely written by my late friend Dr. Blair Rogers, although I can still pick out the parts I wrote - mostly the photo history. They've even put up the full text as a pdf that can be downloaded. Blair really pushed me into writing about the Civil War photographs, and I appreciate his efforts (perhaps more now than I did in the early 1990s.)

Thursday, March 20, 2008

This week's flickr pictures

Kathleen and I have been putting up a few pics this week as the fancy has struck us. Check these out:

March 17th:

MAMAS H141-H
Retractors made from scrap metal. 44th Field Hospital, 8th Detachment. World War 2. 09/23/1945.

March 18:

cp 944 small
"Gunshot fracture of left superior maxilla." Private Henry Morgan, Co. D, 77th New York Volunteers, wounded at Petersburgh, VA on April 2, 1865. Treated at Harewood Hospital, Washington DC, by Dr. Reed B. Bontecou who also had the photograph made.

SP79 small
"Shell Wound of the face, with great destruction of the soft parts." Private Joseph Harvey, Co. C, 149th New York Volunteers. Wounded at Chancellorsville, Virginia on May 3 1863.

sp58 small
"Case of Corporal Bemis, Thrice Severely Wounded in Three Battles." Cpl. Edson D. Bemis, Co. K, 12th Massachussetts, wounded at Battles of Hatcher's Run, the Wilderness and Antietam.

MAMAS CA44-373-2
Mobile Optical Unit. 4th Medical Depot, Italy. 06/07/1944.

March 19:

CP 2452
Detachment of Hospital Corps taking patients over obstacles on the way to the hospital. Illustrating the equipment and operation of the brigade field hospital. Exhibit of the Army Medical Department, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, 1901.

NCP 15169 Batchelor - Saboteuse small
"Saboteuse" - World War II venereal disease prevention poster by editorial cartoonist C.D. Batchelor for the American Social Hygiene Association.

Reeve 60857 hyacinth
Panama. Dr. H.C. Clark. Gorgas Hospital. Ancon, Canal Zone. Club canoe forcing way through hyacinth beds, Pacora.

March 20:

Reeve 00231 horse
Comparative anatomy, Auzoux model of horse, life size. Specimen no. 2635. [papier mache, on display in Army Medical Museum] (We no longer have the model, although one can be seen in the Science Museum in London. This one's for Morbid Anatomy).

MAMAS G45-50-I
An enlisted technician rides along with patient to ground level to insure safety. from a series: "Air Evacuation from China to India," Patients flown over the 'hump' from China to India to be admitted to the 142nd General Hospital for further disposition.

More information about each picture can be seen on our flickr site. Visit our 3rd flickr page regularly, or sign up to be a contact so you know when new pictures go up.

David Challinor's obituary


I never met, nor to be honest, had heard of Dr. David Challinor of the Smithsonian before reading his obituary yesterday. These sentences caught my eye:

He also wrote more than 200 " Letters from the Desk of David Challinor" that are in the Smithsonian's digital repository and available online. They address issues such as flu pandemics, tree ecology, bird song accents and dialects, the nature of trust, hydrothermal vents and "good smells and bad."

I read the bird flu article today - it's a good summation. As you can see by downloading some of those World War 1 medical histories that have been linked to here previously, the Army Medical Museum was quite concerned with investigating the 'Spanish flu' in 1918, and specimens preserved then were used by AFIP scientists to genotype that flu in the 1990s, demonstrating one value of a museum collection. You can see the Museum's flu pictures on the main website.