A Repository for Bottled Monsters: neuralgia

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Trigeminal neuralgia

Tomorrow's Washington Post magazine, which gets delivered to my house on Saturday, runs an article about a man with trigeminal neuralgia, "an affliction so intolerable it's known as the 'suicide disease,'" because the pain is said to be the worst a person can experience. It's a sudden, electrical pain that can be triggered by as little as water from the shower cascading over the face, by shaving, by applying makeup. This sounded so familiar because my dad had this kind of pain and I heard it described in exactly the same way. It took me a while to remember what he called it, and a quick Google search told me that his tic douloureux and trigeminal neuralgia were the same thing. Today there are a few treatment options but he had to live with it for many years. I don't know how he did it.

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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Saturday, August 16, 2008

Trigeminal neuralgia

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