May 6: A Conversation on Nursing at Walter Reed

A Conversation on Nursing at Walter Reed

Second in NMHM’s Walter Reed Centennial Year Lecture Series

When: Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Where: Russell Auditorium, National Museum of Health and Medicine

What: Kick off National Nurses Week with "A Conversation on Nursing at Walter Reed." An informal discussion, featuring the history of nursing at Walter Reed, perspectives on current practices, and thoughts on the future of the Army Nurse Corps, will commemorate 100 years of nursing at Walter Reed.

Presenters: Debbie Cox, former Army Nurse Corps Historian; CPT Jennifer Easley, Medical/Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, WRAMC; LTC Patrick Ahearne, Staff Officer, Office of the Army Nurse Corps, Office of the Army Surgeon General

Cost: Free

Info: (202)782-2200 or nmhminfo@afip.osd.mil

www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum

American College of Surgery Archives website

Susan Rishworth is the archivist of the American College of Surgery Archives, and when I saw her at AAHM, she noted that they're starting to digitize some of of their collections. Check out their website.

Delousing WW1 photos and Flickr stats

Sterilizer. 01/21/1919. LeManns [Le Mans?], Sarthe, France. View of sterilizer. Interior. At salvage branch, American Embarkation Center. Delouser.

Our Flickr stats are at 1,307 items / 793,036 views this evening, slowly closing in on 800K, in spite of a series of WW1 delousing photographs that Kathleen put up recently.



German delousing and bathing plant. Interior view. Steam delouser compartments. Andenaide?, Belgium. 11/14/1918.

National Gallery trip today

In the pouring rain. With streets blocked off by DC police - on a Sunday morning no less. But I found this little gem that I hadn't seen before. (And really, it's not out of focus; I wonder if the artist didn't paint it soft like this because of the subject. Just a thought.)


Autopsy at the Hôtel-Dieu by Henri Gervex, 1876.

Guide to Collections is now online

It was a long, hard haul, but the 2009 edition of the Guide to the Collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (the first update in 10 years) is now online at the Internet Archive. You can download the PDF here.

Applause, please.

Medical Design Excellence

Thirty-two winners in the 2009 Medical Design Excellence competition have been named.

My two faves are
1. The Medigenic infection control keyboard, manufactured and submitted by Esterline Advanced Input Systems (Coeur d’Alene, ID). The Medigenic infection control keyboard addresses studies showing hospital keyboards to be a source of bacterial cross-contamination. The keyboard helps monitor its own cleaning status. I remember swabbing keyboards with alcohol when I worked in in a medical library and it always kind of makes my skin crawl at the public library when I need to log on. Next thing Medigenic needs to work on is antibacterial mice. They have a high yuck factor too.




2. The Whiz Freedom hygienic urine director, manufactured and submitted by Jbol Ltd. (Oxford, United Kingdom). (Do ya love the name?) The Freedom hygienic urine director is a hydrophobic, antibacterial, and eco-friendly device that enables women to urinate standing or sitting, indoors or outdoors, without undressing. It is suitable for use by incontinent or mobility-impaired users. Ladies, wouldn't you find this eminently useful at least once in your life? Just put it in the trunk with the Send Help banner and the road flares.

Cover of our new WRAMC photo book

The Government Printing Office sold 72 copies or so today at their stand in the hospital. You can buy it on their website - Walter Reed Army Medical Center Centennial: A Pictorial History – $35.00

Dissection photo cutting room floor

Here's a picture of ours (NCP 7) that didn't make it into the Dissection photo book.

White House on Flickr; can we be far behind?

Keith Axline at Wired says that the White House put up almost 300 photographs on Flickr this week.

"Perhaps we'll be able to post pictures from work again someday...," the photo archivist noted wistfully.

CSI: Borden Institute

Borden Institute book designer Doug wrote to me today:

We weren't able to get a definite date from the network, but either tonight or next Thursday "CSI - Crime Scene Investigations" will be using one of our books in an episode. Looking at the episode summaries it looks like tonight may be the night.

Lawrence Fishburn and another doctor are s upposed to be consultingwith our "Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare" book in an effort to deal with an outbreak caused by a patient receiving a transplant of an infected organ.

You can watch the broadcast tonight on CBS at 9:00 (8 Central and Mountain) or you can go out to the website http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi/video/ later and watch the episode "The Gone Dead Train."

New Walter Reed hospital photo book by Archives staff

The Museum’s Archives staff supported the publication of these two new books from the Borden Institute that feature the history of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. See the details and links below for more information.

1) Walter Reed Army Medical Center Centennial: A Pictorial History – “A profusely illustrated history covering the full range of WRAMC’s activities in service to the Army and the Nation.” Hardbound. Over half of the photographs are from the Museum’s collections, and Museum archivist Kathleen Stocker was the photographer for some of the views of the buildings of the current campus.

· S/N: 008-000-01020-0

· Price: $35.00

· Link: http://bookstore.gpo.gov/actions/GetPublication.do?stocknumber=008-000-01020-0

2) Borden’s Dream – “An engaging history-memoir covering WRAMC’s early history, filled with stories about the people and events that shaped its evolution as an institution.” Hardbound.

· S/N: 008-023-00135-9

· Price: $55.00

· Link: http://bookstore.gpo.gov/actions/GetPublication.do?stocknumber=008-023-00135-9

We helped find replacement photographs for some of the missing images in the typescript copy of Borden's Dream.

A display is in the hospital lobby and May 1.

Block the flu in style

Core77, the design blog, shows some masks being worn in Mexico. People find a silver lining in any kind of cloud, it seems.

NLM updates its photo website

Here's the PR, but I saw this at AAHM, and tried it out more today, and it works much better than the old one. And they've gotten rid of those ridiculous watermarks. 60000 images is nothing to be sneezed at either, and they've put some surprising clinical pictures up too (search World War 1 Base Hospital for example).

New look, advanced features for NLM's Images from the History of Medicine (IHM)

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine announces the launch of a new image platform for its premier database, Images from the History of Medicine (IHM). Using award winning software developed by Luna Imaging, Inc., NLM offers greatly enhanced searching and viewing capabilities to image researchers. Patrons can view search results in a multi-image display, download high resolution copies of their favorite images, zoom in on image details, move images into a patron-defined workspace for further manipulation, and create mediagroups for presenting images and sharing them via e-mail or posting on blogs. With these new capabilities, NLM greatly enhances usability of its image collection, where inspection and comparison of images is often as important as access to bibliographic data. IHM is available online, free of charge, at http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov.

Comprising almost 70,000 images from the Prints and Photographs and other collections held in the History of Medicine Division, IHM is one of the largest image databases in the world dedicated to images of medicine, dentistry, public health, the health professions, and health institutions. The collection includes portraits, photographs, caricatures, genre scenes, posters, and graphic art illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine. Most types of printmaking are represented: woodcuts, engravings, etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, and lithographs. Also included in the collection are illustrations from the
historical book collection. Newly acquired posters and other materials are continually being added to IHM. The collection is administered by the NLM History of Medicine Division.

Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Library of Medicine is the world's largest library of the health sciences. For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) -- The Nation's Medical Research
Agency -- includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the
U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal
agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational
medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures
for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and
its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov/.

Ginny Cathcart
Curator, Prints and Photographs
History of Medicine Division
National Library of Medicine

For questions, please contact the History of Medicine Division Reference
Desk at hmdref@nlm.nih.gov

Papercutting Wow!

This is a papercut by American artist Hunter Stabler called "Baba Yaga Misquotes the Face to Steeleye Span." Not all of his work is anatomical, but it's all fantastic. What skill and patience.

Swine flu? How about Spanish flu?

Smith Flu 3: Convalescent pneumoconiosis

In these days of our photographs of the WW1 influenza epidemic appearing in papers (uncredited at times, alas), here's a reminder that you can see all of our photographs from two other epidemics on our website - 1918 Influenza Epidemic and 1957 Influenza Epidemic.


58-15573-67 - Child Gargling Broth, Sagamihara Hospital, Japan, August 9, 1957.

Two medical museum references in today's New York Times Science section

The Mutter for "Bone, a Masterpiece of Elastic Strength," By NATALIE ANGIER, in which one can find out Mr. Eastlack had requested that his skeleton be preserved for scientific research, and today it can be seen at the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia — or rather, they can be seen. As the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi has observed in his book “Mutants,” Mr. Eastlack’s skeleton, with its “extra sheets, struts and pinnacles of bone,” amounts to “that of a 40-year-old man encased in another skeleton, but one that is inchoate and out of control.” I've seen his skeleton and it's very striking. Our museum has a skeleton of Peter Cluckey, a Spanish-American War veteran in which ALL of his joints fused, including his jaw, so he couldn't move or eat.

The Dittrick's Dissections book is featured again in "Snapshots From the Days of Bare-Hands Anatomy," By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. April 28, 2009.

Hairballs, hairballs

This happened this afternoon, but some of it still lingers:

What: National Hairball Awareness Day! NMHM is preparing a temporary exhibition of hairballs for display. Plan now to visit the Museum at 12 p.m. on Monday, April 27 to learn how hairballs form in the stomach, see a selection of human and animal hairballs on display, and get a chance to hold an animal hairball! Hairballs, also known as bezoars, form in the stomach of humans and some animals, and are made of indigestible matter such as hair, food and some medicines.

Want to learn more about hairballs? Check out the Museum's virtual exhibit here http://nmhm.washingtondc.museum/exhibits/virtual/hairball.html.

Dissection photos book review

This book by Jim Edmondson and John Harley Warner was quite a hit when I carried my copy into work today. Here's what another medical historian thought of it - "Gather 'Round the Cadaver: A new book examines photographs of medical students posing with the bodies they dissected," By Barron H. Lerner, Slate Friday, April 24, 2009.

April 29: Walter Reed Centennial History Symposium

Lots of friends and colleagues speaking here - if you decide to attend, remember to bring a photo id. The auditorium is upstairs in the old hospital. I hope to make most of the morning sessions.

Walter Reed Centennial History Symposium
Schedule and Program

April 29, 2009, Wednesday
Vorder Bruegge Auditorium, Bldg #1, Old Main Hospital


0800 Welcome and Introduction
Sherman Fleek, WRAMC Historian

0810 Opening Remarks
COL Coots, Commander, WRHCS

0820 Program Overview and Schedule
Dr. Dale Smith, Senior VP, USUHS
Program Chair and Commentator

0830 Keynote Presentations:

Walter Reed the Man and his Family
Dr. John Pierce, MD, COL USA (Ret)

Yellow Fever: The Scourge Revealed
CAPT Stanton E. Cope, MSC, USN, PhD

1000 Break

1020 Second Session

Walter Reed General Hospital and the Rise of the American Military Medical Complex
Jessica L. Adler, PhD Candidate

The Army School of Nursing at Walter Reed
Scott R. Schoner, Museum Curator

1130 Third Session

Walter Reed Hospital, Rehabilitation Medicine, and Reconstruction Aides in World War I America
Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD

Physical Rehabilitation at Walter Reed: The First Decade, 1917-27
Sanders Marble, PhD

1230 Lunch

1330 Fourth Session

“The Patient is First, and Always”:COL Ogden C. Bruton and the Legacy of Pediatric Care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
COL Thomas R. Burklow, MD

A Remembrance of Dr. Ogden Bruton
Marcia Boyle, Foundation President

1430 Centennial Film Preview

1530 Closing Remarks
Dr. Dale Smith

Tour of Building #1 and Campus (Optional, 1 hour tour) Sherman Fleek




Presenter Biographies:

Jessica L. Adler PhD Candidate, History: Columbia University, New York City

Marcia Boyle Founder and President of the Immune Deficiency Foundation, established in 1980. The Foundation is the national non-profit patient organization dedicated to improving the diagnosis, treatment and quality of life of persons with primary immunodeficiency diseases through advocacy, education and research.

Thomas R. Burklow COL, MC, Chief of Pediatrics at Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Stanton E. Cope PhD CAPTAIN, Medical Service Corps, United States Navy, served as entomologist for 20 years; winner of Campbell Collection Award for YF material at UCLA; delivered numerous publications on yellow fever experiments in Cuba. Director, Armed Forces Pest Management Board, Silver Spring, MD

Sanders Marble PhD, AB, William & Mary; MA and PhD, King’s College University of London; five years as historian with Office of Medical History, Office of The Surgeon General, U.S. Army

John R. Pierce Retired U.S. Army Colonel and physician, former chief of pediatrics at Walter Reed Army Medical Center; Department of Veterans Affairs; he the co-author of Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered its Deadly Secrets, 2005.

Jeffrey S. Reznick PhD is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Modern History of the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, a member of its Centre for First World War Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is author of two books in the Culture History of Modern War series of Manchester University Press – Healing the nation: Soldiers and the culture of care-giving in Britain during the Great War (2004) and John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War (forthcoming, 2009) – as well as numerous articles which explore the medical, material, and memorial cultures of 1914-1918. Reznick lives in Rockville, Maryland, and he serves as Director of the Institute for the Study of Occupation and Health of the American Occupational Therapy Foundation, Bethesda, Maryland.

Scott R. Schoner Curator of the U.S. Army Medical Department Museum, Ft. Sam Houston, Texas.

Women of the World, Raise Your Hands (or maybe just your guns!)

I found this image while going through the NCP, (New Contributed Photograph,) file; signed by F. Schultz, this illustration struck me as being especially intriguing. Not only is it a depiction of a handgun firing in slow motion, but if you look closely, you will see that the marksman, (more like markswoman,) is wearing pink fingernail polish! Although the image is educational in and of itself, you have to give the artist kudos for feminizing this illustration. As an avid shooter myself, hats off to you, F. Schultz!