A Repository for Bottled Monsters: gunshot wound

Showing posts with label gunshot wound. Show all posts

Monday, March 1, 2010

Photos of the day, March 1

It’s turned out to be much easier to find a letter of the day (see our blog at bottledmonsters.blogspot.com if you’re viewing this on Flickr) than a photo with a date attached, but today we were successful. Here are two photos of the same patient who suffered a gunshot wound of the shoulder during the Korean War. They’re labeled 53-8668-5 and 53-8668-6, from the Korean War Ballistics photo collection.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Blackhawk as sickbed reading, circa 1951

53-2024-1 GSW of lower femur (with comic)

Here's a picture that one of the assistant archivists brought to my attention today. This poor guy has a gunshot wound of his lower femur (shown with a Blackhawk comic book on the bed) during the Korean War, 1951.

Scanned on a computer old enough to require a scuzzy port to connect to the scanner, copied to a cd and then carried home to be uploaded to Flickr and blogged about.

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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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Monday, March 1, 2010

Photos of the day, March 1

Monday, November 24, 2008

Blackhawk as sickbed reading, circa 1951

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