The Wonders of Flickr

A Flickr user by the name of Endless Forms Most Beautiful included some of my photographs as his/her favorites so of course I had to go check out this person to see how nefarious their intentions are. Endless Forms says on their profile that "I'm using this as a place to collect interesting things for inspiration and teaching" and what a wonderful collection of images they have! This set, called Kunstformen, draves.org is from a series of 100 lithographs entitled "Kunstformen der Natur," German for "Artforms of Nature", created by Ernst Haeckel in 1899-1904. Here's just one example, that reminded me of something seen through an electron microscope. It's a fascinating set of images.

"A Village Hospital 1928 Through 1953"

Another of our researchers has just had her book published. Beverly Moore emailed me late last week that her book, A Village Hospital 1928 through 1958, is now available online. It was a lot of fun working with Beverly, finding pictures of hospitals and nursing activities of a time long gone. Best of luck, Beverly!

The Ball Collection. The End.

The final step has been taken on the James Moores Ball ophthalmology collection that I worked on for lo those many months. It is now online. You may enjoy the finding aid at your leisure.

Post recommends "ancient museum of veterinary science, complete with flayed human cadavers"

See "A Brush With The Paris Art Scene: Out-of-the-Way Sites Show Off The Avant-Garde Side of the City," By Blake Gopnik, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page F01 for his recommendation of the 250-year-old National Veterinary School's museum. Here's the details on visiting from the Post -

WHAT TO DO: National Veterinary School/Fragonard Museum (7 Avenue du General de Gaulle, Alfort, 011-33-(0)1-43-96-71-72, http://musee.vet-alfort.fr). Admission about $8.75, younger than 18 free.

Any of our readers ever been there?

New book based on NMHM collection available

Paul E. Sluby Sr. tracked our St. Elizabeths Hospital Collection down a few years ago and says his book "Burial Ledger of St. Elizabeths Hospital is a straight transcription of the ledger you copied for me. In 1982, I published "Civil War Cemeteries of the D.C. Metropolitan Area." In this I covered the St. Elizabeths Civil War cemetery on the west campus and the continuation of those burials on the east campus." While the original ledger is available to anyone who'd like to see it in our Archives, this transcription will be much easier for genealogists or historians to use.

MOMA updates website, can NMHM be far behind?

Yes.

But this article "To Ramp Up Its Web Site, MoMA Loosens Up," By RANDY KENNEDY, NY Times March 5, 2009 is pretty interesting. Although given our parent agency (the US Army), you'd never know "The era is one in which blogs, photo sharing, social networking, bookmarking and many other ways of creating art-loving online communities have become a much more important part of museum Web sites..."

Photo contest entered by Archives staff

Kathleen, who takes a lot of photographs for us in the Museum, entered a Your-Dream-Photography-Assignment contest and would appreciate it if you would take a minute to vote for her and her idea of photographing religious architecture across America. You do that by clicking on the little box on the leftish side of the screen that has the word “Pics” in it. Here is the link: http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/tiz_herself/picturing-god-revealing-americas-religious-architecture/ You can see her photos on Flickr.

Of course if she wins, she'll be asking for a year off...

Osler and the study of death lecture online

John Erlen of the University of Pittsburgh sent in this video lecture link today, which I'm watching now.

February 26, 2009
Paul Mueller
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic
“Foundations of Palliative Care: William Osler’s Study of the Act of Dying.”

Mueller found Osler's original statistical card study at McGill University and goes through it - very good! I do think that deleting the names of people from 1900 is over-'protecting' privacy.

History of Medicine videos from UVA on YouTube

Well, this is neat:

The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and the University of Virginia School of Medicine are pleased to announce a new service: Medical Center Hours are now available for viewing on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/uvamch. Subscriptions to the channel are offered as a convenient feature for the new service. We encourage you to subscribe! The Medical Center Hour (MCH) is the School of Medicine's weekly forum on medicine and society. Produced by the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities, The Medical Center Hour is an hour-long program held on Wednesdays from mid-September through March. Many Medical Center Hours are History of the Health Sciences Lectures, co-sponsored by the Library’s Historical Collections. The first MCH available on YouTube is Robert Martensen, M.D., Ph.D., presenting “A Doctor’s Reflections on Illness in a High Tech Era,” on 18 February 2009. Dr. Martensen’s talk is a History of Health Sciences Lectures, all available from this point forward at http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/lectures.cfm.

'Brought to Life' Exhibit Features Battlefield Surgery Web Exercise

More than a few blogs are pointing out the opening of the new 'Brought to Life' exhibit at the Science Museum in London. This is from the Wellcome Library's blog:

Today has seen the launch of 'Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine', a new online resource from the Science Museum.

The website showcases more than 2,500 objects, the majority of which were originally collected by or on behalf of Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936). Mostly populated by items now held in the Science Museum’s stores, the website also draws on items from the Wellcome Library.

'Brought to Life' places these items in their historical contexts, giving information on practitioners, their techniques, the medical objects they used and the patients they aimed to heal, all wrapped up in a timeline stretching from Ancient Egypt to the present day. There are also ten multimedia games, including a trip to a plague-ridden town in the Middle Ages and an immersive account of battlefield surgery through the ages.

Considering our own interests in battlefield surgery, I thought it was worth re-posting the Wellcome note here. I checked out the battlefield surgery exercise, pretty cool stuff.

Enjoy.

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....
.

The VisualMD

Anatomical Travelogue, a medical visualization company, has created a new site that should be pretty neat when its done, it's in beta testing right now. The site has health guides, a library of images and videos on various topics. A lot of images are recycled from some books they've done on various health topics. A lot of those images have been shown at the museum in past exhibits and some of the embryology images are from pictures and data from the Human Developmental Anatomy Center.

Researchers from Japan lead to news story

Here's a story on a 1954 fisherman whose death the AFIP consulted on: "US sought tissue from dead fisherman after 1954 H-bomb test," Chiba (Japan), Feb 23. Researchers from Japan were in last month, looking at various collections relating to radiation injury and then we got a call from a reporter a few days later.

James Hansen, the person who sent in the case and later donated his records of it, became the director of the AFIP in the 1970s and his daughter is planning on donating his personal papers to us this year. I didn't read the documents (which are in the AFIP Historical Files under "Hansen" for those interested), so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the news story. DeCoursey was on the ground after the atomic bombing of Japan, and took some motion picture footage, so it would make sense that he retained his interest in radiation injuries.

Walter Reed medical center WW1 photos appearing on Flickr

Kathleen's uploading a bunch of World War I photos from Walter Reed hospital up on our Flickr account now, since she purchased a Pro account for us. She's also put up some veterinary shots.

We've been pulling these photographs for a year to possibly include in a book on the campus, which is just about finished now. Produced by the Borden Institute, it should be going to the Government Printing Office this coming week, and be available for purchase by April. The photographs included come from many places including us, WRAMC's archives, the National Archives, WRAMC's Dept. of Public Works archive, and John Pierce, a collector and historian.

As of today, Flickr's stats are reporting that our 755 photographs have over 110,000 views. Web2.0 is an amazing thing.

Thanks for checking us out!

The day I merged the 4 Flickr accounts into one, and talked about it here, our viewership soared on the combined account: 2790 views on that day alone. Thank you!

Baby's Got a Brand New Name

I had a "duh!" moment today when I talked to Mike about coming up with a name for our combined Flickr account. Medical Museum just tripped off his tongue and so it is. You can find us here at Flickr.

Moving Day

This morning I finished moving both of the remaining Flickr accounts to consolidate them into one. Feel free to visit and add tags and send us emails if we need to add individual photos to sets or even add more sets.

We're also batting around ideas of what to call it, rather than 99129398@N00. National Museum of Health and Medicine is a little wordy, NMHM too cryptic, and we've blanked out on anything else. We could use some ideas.

We're Migrating...

...to one Flickr account. We finally have a pro account so I took a leap of faith and downloaded a migration program that I had to have Microsoft Explorer (ugh) for, downloaded that, and am now in the process of migrating Otisarchives2 to Otisarchives1. It takes a while so the other two accounts probably won't be done until tomorrow.

Brazilian pathology blog

Here's a tip from one of the pathologists at work - his friend Luciano Franco of Brazil has started The Background Doc, a blog about interesting autopsies he's done. Of the first four posts, I'd say two were of general interest - polycystic kidney disease and worms in the gut.

Sec of Smithsonian on future

Our friends at the Medical Museion linked to this first - "Wayne Clough is still trying to connect the Smithsonian Institution"