A Repository for Bottled Monsters: birth defects

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Letter of the Day: December 22

Curatorial Records: Numbered Correspondence 1888

December 22, 1896

Mr. A. R. Harper
Ruston, La.

Dear Sir:

Your letter of the 15th inst., with photograph of human monster has been referred to me by the Smithsonian Institution. If you will forward it for inspection, I will examine it and let you know what its value to the Museum would be. I will add, however, that under no circumstances, it is worth more than $12.00 to $15.00, as such specimens are not rare.

Should you decide to forward it, you may send it properly boxed by Adams Express, which has authority to receive and forward it and collect freight charges here. Address: Army Medical Museum, Cor. 7th and B Sts., S.W., Washington, D.C.

Very respectfully,

D.L. Huntington
Deputy Surgeon General, U.S. Army,
In charge of Museum and Library Division.

[the photograph was kept as CP 2276, but is now missing]

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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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Letter of the Day: December 22

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