BUMED's historians upload 2000th item to Medical Heritage Library

May 19, 2014

After slightly more than a year of uploading material to the Medical
Heritage Library, the US Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's 2000th
item appeared online today. "A Series of Reports to the Nursing Division
of the activities of the Nurse Corps Officers serving aboard the U.S.
Naval Hospital in the Repose"* is now easily available for research. The
reports from CDRs Angelica Vitillo and M.T. Kovacevich back to Captain
Ruth Erickson, Director of the Navy Nurse Corps, and her successor CAPT
Veronica Bulshefski date from 8 November 1965 to 2 December 1966. They
are in turns informative, chatty and sad.

"Our first direct casualty which arrived Saturday, the nineteenth, was
a nineteen year old bilateral mid-thigh amputee who to date has received
over 45 pints of blood." (28 February 1966)

"The improvements we have initiated in our individual staterooms have
contributed to maintaining a high state of moral among the nurses, One
of the base shops at Hunters Point allowed us to misappropriate an
assortment of very colorful and feminine looking bedspreads for our
rooms." (13 December 1965)

"Death claimed the life of a very young man who had extensive chest
wounds on Monday, the seventh and a thirty three year old arm amputee
with other extensive wounds on Tuesday the eighth. Some of our young
nurses are feeling these losses acutely." (9 March 1966)

These letters join a soon-to-be complete set of over 1000 issues of 70
years of Navy Medicine magazine**; oral histories with veterans of World
War 2, Korea and Vietnam;*** a growing collection of audiovisuals
including one on the Navy's humanitarian efforts after the Vietnam
War****; and many other items.

*
https://archive.org/details/USSReposeSeriesOfReportsToTheNursingDivisionOfTheActivitiesOfTheNurseCorpsOffice

**
https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Ausnavybumedhistoryoffi
ce%20AND%20subject%3A%22Navy%20Medicine%20magazine&sort=-publicdate

***
https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Ausnavybumedhistoryoffi
ce%20oral%20history&sort=-publicdate

**** https://archive.org/details/THELUCKYFEWWMV91280x72016x9

A small selection of our photographs may  be found on Flickr at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/navymedicine/

Michael Rhode
Archivist / Curator
US Navy BUMED Office of Medical History

ALHHS Publication award goes to NMHM archivist Eric Boyle

The ALHHS awards committee is proud to announce the recipients of
ALHHS awards for 2014. Winners were recognized at the annual ALHHS
business meeting, held on May 8, 2014 at the American College of
Surgeons in Chicago, IL.

The ALHHS Publication award went to Eric W. Boyle for his book, Quack
Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century
America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013). Throughout the 20th
century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted
to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and
healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to
medical science. Boyle's book reveals how efforts to establish an
exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and
medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this
failure.

The AlHHS Online Resource award went to the Waring Historical Library
Curator Susan Hoffius and Digital Archivist Jennifer Welch for their
on-line exhibit of the Porcher Medicinal Garden. The website and its
corresponding physical-location garden serve to increase public
awareness of the holdings of the Earing Historical Library and,
specifically the collection of Dr. F. Peyre Porcher.

The ALHHS Merit Award was given to Dr. and Mrs. Adam G.N. Moore for
their support of the collections of the Center for the History of
Family Medicine (CHFM). In 2012, the Moores donated more than 600
items including rare books, pamphlets, periodicals, and ephemera from
their personal library to create the new Adam G.N. Moore, MD,
collection in the History of Family Medicine at the CHFM.


Please join us in congratulating our award recipients for their
outstanding work.


- The 2014 ALHHS Awards Committee (Eric Luft, Rachel Howell,
and Judith Wiener, chair)

New medical museum in Louisiana

	Willis-Knighton unveils WK Innovation Center Shreveport Times The expansion also includes the Talbot Museum, a medical museum that displays the history of the Willis-Knighton system created in 2004. Created ...

Indiana Historical Medical Museum theft

	WRTV Indianapolis Police discover more items in stolen brains investigation WRTV Indianapolis ... brains and other artifacts from the Indiana Historical Medical Museum after police recovered several boxes of allegedly stolen surgical instruments.

May 7: Lecture on wounded Civil War soldiers at Smithsonian

Erin Corrales-Diaz, Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
"Visualizing 'The Real War': Disabled Civil War Veterans and the U.S. Army Surgeon General's Office" 
4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Smithsonian American Art Museum's McEvoy Auditorium, located at 8th and G Streets NW, Washington, D.C.

http://americanart.si.edu/research/fellowslectures/

NMHM mentioned in article on the Corcoran Gallery

The Great Divide

By Kriston Capps • Photographs by Darrow Montgomery 

Washington City Paper April 25, 2014

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/45699/the-great-divide-22-questions-for-the-corcoran/

See the paragraph Where is the art going?

NMHM's embryology collection in Bull. of History of Medicine

Ex Utero: Live Human Fetal Research and the Films of Davenport Hooker

Emily K. Wilson

From: Bulletin of the History of Medicine 
Volume 88, Number 1, Spring 2014 
pp. 132-160 | 10.1353/bhm.2014.0002

Abstract

Summary:

Between 1932 and 1963 University of Pittsburgh anatomist Davenport Hooker, Ph.D., performed and filmed noninvasive studies of reflexive movement on more than 150 surgically aborted human fetuses. The resulting imagery and information would contribute substantially to new visual and biomedical conceptions of fetuses as baby-like, autonomous human entities that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Hooker's methods, though broadly conforming to contemporary research practices and views of fetuses, would not have been feasible later. But while Hooker and the 1930s medical and general public viewed live fetuses as acceptable materials for nontherapeutic research, they also shared a regard for fetuses as developing humans with some degree of social value. Hooker's research and the various reactions to his work demonstrate the varied and changing perspectives on fetuses and fetal experimentation, and the influence those views can have on biomedical research.

Last 'Radium Girl' dead?

Mae Keane, Whose Job Brought Radium to Her Lips, Dies at 107

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Mrs. Keane, one of the so-called radium girls, was employed at the Waterbury Clock Company in the 1920s when a relatively new material, radium, was used.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/mae-keane-who-painted-watch-dials-with-a-radium-mixture-dies-at-107.html

Heard embryology models at Medical Museum

	Local man's father honored with national embryology exhibition Walla Walla Union-Bulletin ... and to attend an exhibit on Tuesday that celebrates their father's work in research embryology at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

Army Medical Museum's Shufeldt was an unattractive character

	Beyond this article, which has to be read to be believed, he was a fervent racist.
	Museum Files: Audubon legacy outshines scandal Glens Falls Post-Star In 1882, Shufeldt was named curator in the Army Medical Museum. He retired in 1891 with a disability for heart disease. Shufeldt had a thirst for ...

Dr Damann speaks to students about forensic anthropology

	Scientists share experiences with students to encourage interest in ... Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online Franklin Damann, forensic anthropologist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Silver Spring, spoke to students at Rockville High School ...

Newly-created digital archives from African-American psychiatric hospital

Digital Archive to House 100 Years of Historical Documents from World's First Black Mental Institution; UT Scholar Tells Forgotten Story of African-American Psychiatric Patients

Released: 1/23/2014 12:00 PM EST
Source Newsroom: University of Texas at Austin

 

 

http://www.newswise.com/articles/digital-archive-to-house-100-years-of-historical-documents-from-world-s-first-black-mental-institution

 

 

Caricature at the Wellcome Library is online

Artists' Caricatures Show The Macabre History Of Medicine

The Huffington Post  |  By Sara GatesPosted: 01/22/2014http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/22/history-of-medicine-photos-wellcome-images_n_4645670.html

Mutter Museum's Civil War exhibit

Stark Reminders of How Uncivil a War It Was

'Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits' at the Mütter Museum

By DENISE GRADYJAN. 20, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/broken-bodies-suffering-spirits-at-the-mutter-museum.html

Indiana Medical History Museum profiled after brain thefts

This is a nice little museum with a great operating theater.

	Brain thefts boost attendance at tiny museum USA TODAY - The medical museum had an exhibit in 2010 called "The Resurrectionists: Body Snatching in Indiana," which recalled a string of grave robberies in ...

National Library of Medicine's World War I digitization

National Library of Medicine appears to be scanning World War I books and putting them on the Medical Heritage Library. As of now, 32 are cataloged and tagged. There's some obscure-looking material there.

Newly found dissection photo

My good friend Jim Edmonson put together a book of dissection photographs a couple of years ago. Since then, I've been keeping my eyes open for them. Here's one from a collection recently transferred to BUMED's Office of Medical History. Alexander Lyle, one of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery graduates won a Medal of Honor in World War I.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/navymedicine/12000032284/

Jan 22: Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels

On January 22 the Chemical Heritage Foundation will present a live webcast exploring how graphic novels, comic books, and animation are used to tell true stories about science. Titled "Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels," the webcast will feature graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and historian of science Bert Hansen. Our guests will discuss the power of visual media in telling history.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm is the author of Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, which merges text and imagery to vividly detail the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bombs.

Bert Hansen is professor of history of science and medicine at Baruch College of The City University of New York. His book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio, shows how mass-media images both shaped and reflected popular attitudes to medicine from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Professor Hansen has also contributed to Chemical Heritage magazine.

 

You are invited to watch this discussion via webcast. "Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels" will air at 6:30 p.m. EST at chemheritage.org/histchem.

 

For further information contact Michal Meyer via e-mail at MMeyer@chemheritage.org or call her at 215 873-8217.

West Virginia medical museum proposed

Doctor hopes to bring children's medical museum to the city Huntington Herald Dispatch Dr. Ali Oliashirazi laid out his plans for the Huntington Children's Medical Museum during his inaugural presidential address at the society's first ...

Mutter Museum specimen used to track cholera dna

With Help of Victims From 1849, Scientists Decode Early Strain of Cholera

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

JAN. 8, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/science/with-help-of-victims-from-1849-scientists-decode-early-strain-of-cholera.html