A Repository for Bottled Monsters: museums

Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts

Friday, April 30, 2010

At Observatory in Brooklyn

If you're in the neighborhood, Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy is hosting Three Unique Medical Museums in Northern Italy tomorrow night. $5 for great entertainment in New York? What a bargain. Go.

Friday, January 22, 2010

That Old-Time Gonorrhea Treatment

Those of you who follow our Flickr account know we have a special place in our hearts for STDs. Prophylactics, propaganda, you name it; if it has to do with a social disease, we do our best to publish it.

I went to a dusty, off-the-beaten-track museum in New Orleans last weekend - the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum. I have a lot of very neat stuff from there, but have to lead off with A Safe and Speedy Remedy for the Cure of Gonorrhea and Gleet. I have never heard of Gleet.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Harvard's Comparative Zoology Museum

A nice article on the Museum is at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/HarvardGazette12.03.091.pdf

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Medical Museums

I've been planted in front of my computer all day, editing photos. I came across this one from the History of Medicine museum in Paris

which reminded me a lot of the old Army Medical Museum in Washington with the similarities of the upper gallery, the rows of cases, the light flooding in....

Sunday, June 1, 2008

National Museum of the Marine Corps

Today I went to the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia. It's terrific, with a lot of interactive exhibits (care to lift a pack that a recruit has to carry (that's the pack there, on the right), or listen to drill instructors screaming at you from every direction?) and lifelike combat scenes. Here's one of a Marine being cared for by a corpsman. I thought the look on the wounded Marine's face was perfectly portrayed. What I liked about this one, in addition to the face, is that we have photos just like this in our collection, right down
to the IV bottle suspended from a rifle stuck in the ground bayonet first (just out of view here but you can see the line being inserted in his arm). It's a great museum with free admission, both indoor and outdoor exhibit space, and is open 364 days a year. If you're in the neighborhood, I recommend a visit.

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.

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