WRAMC campus plan debate in Post

D.C. begins to plan redevelopment of Walter Reed campus
By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 30, 2010

The article contains the intriguing "District officials said Thursday night that the September 2011 closing date had been pushed back, although it is not clear to when."

Cartoons at Walter Reed hospital

Here's a couple of pictures with cartoon themes that have shown up in the process of doing a photo book on Walter Reed Army Medical Center:



Early 1970s ward in Walter Reed Army Medical Center hospital where soldiers wounded in Vietnam were treated. Note the Uncle Scrooge poster on the wall. From the WRAMC DPW collection.



Garry Trudeau visits wounded soldier at Walter Reed Army Medical Center hospital. Courtesy of the Stripe newspaper.

Upcoming book

Today Kathleen and I joined the staff of the Borden Institute (who publish the Textbooks of Military Medicine) to keep working on a Walter Reed Army Medical Center Centennial Atlas, ie a book of photographs of 100 years of it being a hospital. We're going to make a big push in January to finish the book which should be available in late April. Watch this space.

In the meantime, we still need photographs of the base from the 1970s-1990s. If you were at Walter Reed and have pictures, let us know.

Tours of Forest Glen Seminary, formerly part of Walter Reed

From World War 2 until the 1990s, Walter Reed owned and used the National Park Seminary girl's school buildings at Forest Glen, MD. They didn't maintain the buildings well; around 1989 or so I rescued a post-Works Project Administration mural of the Seminary by Jack McMillan which showed orange jumpsuited psychiatric patients on the grounds. It was being damaged by water leaking down from 3 floors above. The painting is restored and on display in the Museum; in the meantime, you can take tours of the buildings as explained in this article "At an Old Retreat, Signs of Renewal," by Amy Orndorff, Washington Post Friday, April 25, 2008; Page WE05 (which is not quite factual - the theater burned down). There's two photographs on the site as well.

A few points of interest - the fountain, which was badly damaged the last time I saw it, was a sixteenth century work imported from Italy if I remember correctly. Also the ballroom in the main building was restored and is stunning, although a lot of the busts that lined it are missing.

The place is well worth seeing. It's being turned into condos now.

Post on changes for Walter Reed soldiers

To read about some of the changes about patient care at the hospital, see "The Young Lions of Able Troop: To the Cadre on the Front Lines Of Improving Care at Walter Reed, The Challenge Can Rival Combat," By Steve Vogel, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, April 10, 2008; B01.

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.

Wounded vets rebuilding their lives

Walking around Walter Reed, even when not directly involved in patient care, one sees a lot of people who are working to get their bodies and their lives reconstructed. Here's an article about one of them - "Wounded Vet Again Tackles Basic Training; Swimmer Among Those Trying Out For Paralympics," By Amy Shipley, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A01.

You can live in a former Army base

Years and years ago, the Army expanded Walter Reed Army Medical Center by purchasing a former girls school known as the National Park Seminary. Parts of the school buildings were whimsical recreations of European architecture. You can buy a couple of books about the site, or you can just buy a home there. I'm not thrilled that these are becoming condos, but the Army didn't maintain them. In the late 1980s, I mounted a rescue operation of a large painting of psychiatric patients during World War 2. The painting hung on the ground floor of that building you see in their ad, but water leaking from three stories up had damaged it. The Borden Institute paid to have it restored to use in their Textbook of Military Medicine on psychiatry, and it hangs in the Museum now.

Washington Post article on Walter Reed

"Trying Some Disney Attitude to Help Cure Walter Reed," By Steve Vogel, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, February 25, 2008; B01.