Another view of our Resolved exhibit

I think this is my favorite view of the exhibit. That's a transfer case draped with a flag and a backdrop from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Forensic Anthropology Lab at Hickam AFB in Hawaii, showing the process of reconstructing human skeletons with the aim of identification. I always assumed it was a casket that brought our soldiers home, but it's not. The same grim purpose, a more utilitarian box.

Military medicine training article

Speaking of moulages and training, here's an article that talks about their current use. "Trial by (Simulated) Fire: Military Doctors Learn to Practice Wartime Medicine on Mock Battlefield," By Philip Rucker, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, August 8, 2008; B01. I met the doctor who's quoted at the end, Capt. Trueman Sharp, last year when the museum got a collection of Vietnam-era medical data from his department for scanning - the Wound Data Munitions Effectiveness Team (WDMET) records include wounding information, x-rays, 35mm slides and sometimes fragments. We've got the material being scanned now, but it's going to take a while to finish.

1918 flu comic for downloading

In my private life, I dabble in comic art history. Dave Lasky's done a comic book "No Ordinary Flu" about the 1918 influenza epidemic for King County in Washington State. You can download it as a pdf in multiple languages. Their website reads:

To promote pandemic flu preparedness, Public Health - Seattle & King County has developed a 12-page comic book on pandemic flu. Targeting readers of all ages, this story tells the tale of a family’s experience of the 1918 influenza pandemic. It also explains the threat of pandemic flu today, illustrates what to expect during a pandemic (such as school closures), and offers tips to help households prepare.

You can also hear Lasky on KUOW's Sound Focus for August 6th - "No Ordinary Flu and Recipes for Peaches." Here's a direct link.

Thanks to cartoonists Scott Gilbert and Scott Faulkner for the tips!

Is there any place for human remains in a museum (these days)?

Mike's post yesterday about a conference at which the title of this post will be discussed leads me to show you these pictures. They're all from our Resolved exhibit on identifying human remains. I'll show more pictures of the exhibit in future posts, but try to imagine the gaps if these body parts, out of squeamishness or political correctness, were no longer in our collection. Imagine our anatomical collections manager trying to explain, in words alone, how a female and male pelvis are different. Or what the mandible of a child of a particular age looks like (remember, no objects for illustration). Or the differences among the skulls of Europeans, Asians, and Africans. I'm still kind of new to the museum game as an employee, but as a long-time museum-goer, I think there's not a lot of place for this kind of question from museum professionals.

Human remains symposium in Paris text online

My colleagues at Biomedicine on Display caught this - International Symposium "FROM ANATOMIC COLLECTIONS TO OBJECTS OF WORSHIP". It dealt with human remains in museums, and the issues of repatriating them. The panels were as follows:

first round-table : repatriating human remains: why, for whom, under which conditions?
second round-table : Is there any place today for human remains inside museums?
third round table : the status of human remains from a legal, ethical and philosophical point of view
fourth round table : How to reach a mutual understanding? Institutional mediations and negotiations

Obviously the phrasing of the 2nd round-table just bugs me right away. Why shouldn't there be a place for human remains in a museum? I don't particularly care if mine end up there, and former museum pathologist Daniel Lamb insisted on it.

The whole text of the symposium is downloadable and I'm looking forward to reading it.

War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq featured by New York Times

This book, War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq, is by a friend of mine who's been working on it for several years. The book is in the grand tradition of the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion which was also compiled to address problems of injuries during a war. It's published by the Borden Institute at Walter Reed where a lot of my friends and colleagues work as well - we're currently working on a photographic history of Walter Reed medical center for the 100th anniversary, right before they shut it down.

The article about the atlas of injuries is "To Heal the Wounded," By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., New York Times August 5, 2008

There's also audio files linked to on the main page, as well as photographs.

Limb lab continuation - that Civil War amputee

In a paper for Invisible Culture 5 - "Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Images, Memory, and Identity in America," by J.T.H. Connor and Michael G. Rhode, we used Stratton's image. We noted, "After the war, disabled veterans used their photographs to support themselves in a variety of ways. Private Alfred Stratton took the most direct route. During the war, he endured a double amputation of both arms in 1864 and, as a result, received a pension of twenty-five dollars a month. In 1869, he visited the Museum and had his photograph taken. In later years, he sold carte-de-visites of himself in a uniform as a disabled soldier."

Here's the medical museum's photograph of Stratton:



And the cartes-de-visite Stratton sold to support himself:


This paper has pretty much everything I know about the Museum's Civil War photography and is one of my favorites of articles I've written.

Complicated grief

The Washington Post ran an article today about a condition called complicated grief. We have all had loss in our lives that we have grieved over but as deep as the grief is when fresh, over time it lessens. People who suffer from complicated grief don’t experience that lessening. A discovery that a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens is activated by thoughts and memories of what was lost helps to explain this phenomenon. This part of the brain is associated with cravings and addiction, and in anticipating a reward. The theory is that those people who can't adjust to their loss are experiencing something pleasurable in their memories and "are addicted to the happy memories."

This discovery also explains why these people don't respond to traditional remedies for depression, which act on a different brain system involving serotonin. Scientists thing that a drug that acts on dopamine, which is involved with the nucleus accumbens, might be more effective.

Limb Lab presentation report at blog

Dr. Val Jones reported on Linker and Reznick's presentations a couple of weeks ago on her blog Revolution Health. I'll see if I can put up a picture of the Civil War amputee that sold the pictures of himself - his name was Alfred Stratton, I think.

Appalling practice by US hospitals reported by Times

This extensive investigative report must be read to be believed: "GETTING TOUGH: Immigrants Deported, by U.S. Hospitals," By DEBORAH SONTAG, New York Times August 3 2008.

Many hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because nursing homes won't accept them without insurance.

Surgeon General's Lecture Series at 1100 on 8 August 2008 in Memorial Auditorium, NNMC, Bethesda, MD

My buddy Andre sent this announcement about a lecture. I imagine you cant contact him if you need any additional information:

This is just a reminder that the Surgeon General's Speaker Series is set to continue on 8 August 2008 at 11:00 AM in Memorial Auditorium at the National Naval Medical Center, in Bethesda, MD. The lecture, "Jonathan Messersmith Foltz: Colorful Naval Surgeon and Friend and Foe of President James Buchanan," will be delivered by Ludwig Deppisch, MD, author of the recently acclaimed book, The White House Physician: A History from Washington to George W. Bush. This lecture will be open to all who wish to attend. As a note, this talk will hold special appeal to anyone interested in mid-nineteenth century American political and naval history. The subject of the lecture is a notable Victorian-era Navy surgeon who was linked to many famous literary, political, and scientific figures of his day including President James Buchanan, Admiral David Farragut, Samuel Morse, Edgar Allan Poe, and Queen Victoria. Dr. Foltz served as the first military White House physician, a Fleet Surgeon with Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay, and in 1871 he was appointed as the Surgeon General of the Navy (becoming only the second person to hold that post).

André B. Sobocinski
Deputy Historian/ Publications Manager
Office of the Historian
Bureau of Medicine and Surgery (BUMED)
Tel: (202) 762-3244
Fax: (202) 762-3380
E-Mail: Andre.Sobocinski@med.navy.mil
http://navyhistory.med.navy.mil/

Moulage instruction booklet

As mentioned a couple of days ago, here's an instruction book for moulages meant to simulate mass casualties - Instructor's Guide for Casualty Simulation Kit Device 11E10

Mid-Atlantic history of medicine seminar

Since I'm on vacation, I can actually post to the blog during the day. Here's an announcement that Andrea wanted up:

Announcing the 6th Annual Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of
Medicine, to be held the weekend of September 26-27, 2008, and hosted
by the Section of the History of Medicine and the Program in the
History of Science and Medicine at Yale University in New Haven, CT.
The seminar is organized and coordinated by graduate students across
North America working in fields related to the history of medicine.
Our mission is to foster a sense of community and provide a forum for
sharing and critiquing graduate research by peers from a variety of
institutions and backgrounds.

There is no fee for the Seminar, but registration is required.
The deadline for registration is September 10, 2008.

Please email Julia Irwin at JASMed2008@gmail.com to register.
For further information, see our website at www.jointatlantic.org

Establishing identity

Here's another shot from our Resolved exhibit. It shows the lines of evidence that must be explored in order to establish identity.
Forensic identification is the application of science to establish personal identity.
Postmortem data are an individual's physical characteristics recorded by scientists from a person's remains after death.
Antemortem data are the physical characteristics that a person is born with and acquires throughout life.
Identification results when a person's postmortem data matches an individual's antemortem data to the exclusion of everyone else.
Lines of evidence are those scientific disciplines that contribute to an identification, such as material evidence, fingerprinting, dentistry, anthropology, DNA, and pathology.
A case is resolved when an American returns alive, the remains are recovered, repatriated, and certified, or there is convincing evidence that neither of the two options is possible.

Neat article on why bacteria can make you sick

They group together and plot. See "Social Lives of Bacteria May Yield Benefits for Humans," By David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, July 28, 2008; Page A05.

Resolved

This image is what greets the visitor at the entrance to our new "Resolved" exhibit on identification of war dead. I think it's universal in language, eloquence without words.

Let's look at a photo

This one's for Johanna of the Morbid Anatomy blog - she's seen this picture before, but let's take a look at it.



Comparative anatomy, Auzoux model of horse, life size. Specimen no. 2635. [papier mache, on display in Army Medical Museum]. We no longer have the model, although one can be seen in the Science Museum in London.

For many years, models were a way to convey information in medicine and natural sciences. Color printing had to be hand-done, and photography first didn't exist, and then each photograph for a book had to be printed individually and glued into the book. And hand-tinted if required. So well into the 20th century models like Auzoux's above, or ones like this x-ray burn were produced for education.



Breast. Burn, X-Ray. Wax model. No. 92 X-ray burn involving right breast and axilla. Necrosis of tissue producing sloughing ulceration, the bottom of which includes pleura and lung tissue. X-ray treatment was applied for carcinoma of the breast. Colored, woman, age 35 years. Army Medical Museum model prepared by Dr. J.F. Wallis. [Circa World War 1, 1918].

The museum's model-making skills continued into the 1950s, when a technique called moulage, which simulated injuries in rubber overlays were developed. A soldier would put on a moulage of a nuclear radiation injury for example and then the trainees would attempt to treat him. I'll attempt to get some photographs of them up, although I think we scanned the kit's whole instruction book recently as well.

Check out this conference in Europe on models and Auzoux too.

Memorial to French doctors

This relief is on an exterior wall at the Musée d'Histoire de la Médecine in Paris, kind of tucked away and probably not noticed much. I'm glad I found it. It's a memorial to the 1800 doctors who gave their lives for their country in World War 1.

Victor McKusick, Abraham Lincoln and the Museum

A couple of decades ago Dr. Victor McKusick suggested that Abraham Lincoln may have had Marfan's syndrome and that the museum's specimens should be tested. I'm going by memory here, but I think a blue-ribbon committee was convened, debated, and a decision was made not to test the material because the science wasn't advanced enough yet, and it didn't really matter if Lincoln had Marfan's. Read the three NY Times articles linked above rather than trust my memory. McKusik died recently and the Washington Post ran an obituary and an appreciation while the NY Times ran an obituary.

At the moment, the museum is not contemplating DNA tests on Lincoln's remains, nor any other individuals.

Reminder: Limb Lab Program Tomorrow

Afternoon Coffee Talk at the National Museum of Health and Medicine

Title: "Limb Labs: Getting Amputee Soldiers Back to Work After World War I"

Speakers: Beth Linker, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania and Jeffrey Reznick, Ph.D., Honorary Research Fellow in the Center for First World War Studies at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Institute for the Study of Occupation and Health, AOTF

What: Join a discussion about early efforts to standardize and construct affordable prosthetic arms and legs for amputee soldiers by orthopedic surgeons in America and England during World War I.

When: Thursday, July 24, 2:00-3:30 p.m.

Where: Classroom (AFIP, Bldg. 54)
http://www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum/about/directions.html

Cost: Free! Coffee!