Nov 10: Cancer Education Film at the National Academy of Sciences

This is presented by friends of mine who really know their stuff and should be excellent. I'm planning on seeing it.

The Reward of Courage
Thursday, Nov. 10, 6 p.m. (doors open at 5:30 p.m.)
Keck Center, 500 Fifth St., N.W., Room 100

Join us for a screening of The Reward of Courage , the first public education film about cancer. Released 90 years ago this fall, the film introduced many ideas about cancer that are familiar today. A copy of this hitherto lost silent film was recently discovered, and in excellent
condition. A specially commissioned musical score, performed live by the
Snark Ensemble, will accompany the film.

More Information & RSVP
<http://click.newsletters.nas.edu/?ju=fe2e157376660074761676&ls=fdf017787767
0479741c797c&m=feef12737c620c&l=fe951573766c057973&s=fe1c10757562067a7c1d79&
jb=ffcf14&t=>



*********************

David Cantor PhD
Deputy Director
Office of History
National Institutes of Health
Bldg 45, Room 3AN38, MSC 6330
Bethesda, MD 20892-6330
U.S.A.
Phone: 301-402-8915 (Direct)
301-496-6610 (Office)
Fax: 301-402-1434
http://history.nih.gov/about/Cantor.html

The Old Army Medical Museum and the Watch and Ward Society

NMHM (Reeve 85182-73)

A new blog post over at the Massachusetts Historical Society - "Discovering the New England Watch and Ward Society" - highlights the Godfrey Lowell Cabot papers and their research value in the recent publication by Neil Miller: Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). The Watch and Ward Society monitored illegal and illicit behavior in Boston, wielding considerable political influence between 1878-1967.

Among the Watch and Ward Society material is this mention of the "Old Army Medical Museum," captured here from the MHS post by Anna J. Cook:

On 16 April 1918, J. Frank Chase, the secretary of the Watch and Ward, wrote a letter describing his visit to the Old Army Medical Museum in Washington D.C. for a screening of “Fit to Fight,” a propaganda film that was part of the military’s attempt to combat “the Social Diseases.” While he approved of the general effort, Chase was critical of certain aspects of the film:

Realizing the difficulties of the subject and how mistakes are inevitable and the diversity of opinion even among good people as to the details and the methods of doing this necessary work, I am loathe to criticize the work accomplished. Yet, I must urge one criticism of the method. It concerns the unwisdom [sic] of putting on exhibition at the very beginning or at all the picture of a nude woman of full front view, as is done in this film.

While he acknowledges the “nude” is, in fact, a statue of Venus, he argues that its manner of display is troubling. It “does not declare itself as a statue until after such a time as gives the mind a chance to conclude ‘Here is the picture of a naked woman,’ and to gasp at the boldness.”It is unclear from the existing correspondence whether anyone in the War Department was similarly offended by the film, or whether Chase’s objection to it had any effect on future screenings.

Check out the rest of the post here.

'Terminal Ballistics of Antique and Modern Firearms' online now

Terminal Effects of Projectiles from Antique and Modern Firearms in Ordnance Gelatin / Bone Targets (A1908-83-0010)

Ballistics experiments conducted by shooting bones embedded in gelatin blocks, done at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology by Dr. Bruce D. Ragsdale, M.D., Orthopedic Pathology Department, AFIP & Arnold R. Josselson, LTC, USAF, MC, Forensic Sciences Department, AFIP. Circa 1970.

Viewable at http://www.archive.org/details/TerminalEffectsOfProjectilesFromAntiqueAndModernFirearmsInOrdnance

Fun Films

Found a neat film in the Developmental Anatomy Center.  It is supposed to be one of the first films showing cleavage occuring in a rabbit egg.  Very cool.  Going to scan it into digital format and hopefully post it.

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.