A Repository for Bottled Monsters: women

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Folger Shakespeare Library's medical exhibit tour tomorrow

I saw this a couple of nights ago and it's an excellent exhibit. This bit is clipped from their e-newsletter.

In an era before emergency rooms and HMOs, women offered vital medical care to their families and communities. This "kitchen physic" included dressing wounds, setting bones, delivering babies, administering medicine, and producing homemade remedies for a wide range of illnesses, including the much-dreaded plague. Beyond Home Remedy explores the broad scope of female medical practice in early modern England and America and sheds new light on women's contributions.

through May 14
10am to 5pm, Monday–Saturday

Free

Listen: Kitchen Physic

Learn More: Plague Water

Learn More: A Tudor Herbal

Personal Picks

Folger Fridays: Exhibition Tour

Join Rebecca Laroche, curator of Beyond Home Remedy, for a personal tour of the exhibition, which features a broad range of items from ingredient samples for early modern medicines to Martha Washington's cookbook.

"The exhibition cracks open our conventional sense of home remedies. We have countesses and duchesses and the serving women and everyone in between," she notes.

Fri, Feb 18
7pm

Meet at the First Folio display in the Great Hall.

Free

About the Folger

Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger Shakespeare Library is a major center for scholarly research; a lively venue for performances, readings, and exhibitions; and a national leader in humanities education.

	Address: Folger Shakespeare Library 201 East Capitol Street, SE Washington, DC 20003 Get Directions Plan a Visit				Public Hours: Monday through Saturday: 10am to 5pm Reading Room Hours: Monday through Friday: 8:45am to 4:45pm Saturday: 9am to 12pm and 1pm to 4:30pm Closed all Federal holidays.

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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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Folger Shakespeare Library's medical exhibit tour tomorrow

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