A Repository for Bottled Monsters: scorbutus

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Letter of the Day: January 11

Curatorial Records: Numbered Correspondence 01948

January 11, 1897

Dr. L. Campbell,
Slatington, Pa.

Dear Sir:

I answer to your letter of the 7th inst. I would state that we have several specimens of the effect of scorbutus on the jaw of grown persons, but none in a child. and I should, therefore, be pleased to receive the specimen referred to.

If you conclude to donate it to the Museum, please have it packed in a box marked: Army Medical Museum, Cor. 7th and B sts, S.W., Washington, D.C., and send it by Adams Express, which has authority to receive and forward it and collect freight charges here.

Very respectfully,

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

Friday, January 7, 2011

Letter of the Day: January 7

See Dr. Huntington's reply on January 11, 1897

Curatorial Records: Numbered Correspondence 01948

Established 1870
Treating and Filling
Crowns in Porcelain and Gold
Artifical Teeth
Bridge Work, etc.

Dr. L. Campbell's
Dental Rooms

Slatington, Pa., Jan 7th, 1867

Dr. D.L. Huntington
Deputy Surgeon General
Washington
D.C.

My Dear Doctor

I am in receipt of the Report of the Committee on the National Dental Museum + Library and certainly am in sympathy with such a grand movement and will do all I can for the sucess of it I have a case of "Scorbutus" in a child 2 yrs old a rare case although I do not like to part with it still I may send it I have the teeth of lower jaw all mounted on a plaster cast shape of jaw and set are the same as in the mouth let me know if you have any such case at the Museum

Respectfully
L. Campbell

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

Pages

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Letter of the Day: January 11

Friday, January 7, 2011

Letter of the Day: January 7

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