Civil War doctor Mary Walker coming to a quarter in 2024

https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friends-family/info-2023/notable-women-to-appear-on-quarters.html

https://www.coinnews.net/2023/03/31/designs-recommended-for-2024-american-women-quarters/

Exhibit at Walter Reed Highlights African Americans in Civil War Medicine

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/437560/exhibit-walter-reed-highlights-african-americans-civil-war-medicine

To kick off Black History Month, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center welcomes Dr. Robert Slawson, from the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, as a guest docent Feb. 2 for an exhibit highlighting the contributions of African Americans in Civil War medicine. The exhibit is on display throughout February on the first floor of the America Building (Bldg. 19).... click through the link for the rest of the article.

Scott Schoner, former Army Medical Dept. Museum curator has passed away

Scott Schoner, a former Army Medical Dept. Museum curator, passed away around January 23 2023, in Cookeville, TN of complications of congestive heart failure and RSV. Rather than medical history, Schoner's true love was the  American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and he hoped to create a foundation to continue the documentary history work he was doing after his death.

Hunterian museum removes Irish Giant from display

London Museum Removes 'Irish Giant' Skeleton From Display

The remains of Charles Byrne, a 7-foot-7 man who died in 1783, will no longer be on public view, an effort to address what one official at the Hunterian Museum called a historical wrong.

By Claire Moses

Jan. 21, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/world/europe/charles-byrne-irish-giant-museum.html

Condoms on exhibit in French National Archives

https://entre-temps.net/lhistoire-sous-vitrine-capotes-en-vitrine/

The former AFIP in the news

The founding as the Army Medical Museum is mentioned in passing, AFIP's name is not, and the museum's continuing existence as a separate entity isn't either.

Inside Google's Quest to Digitize Troops' Tissue Samples

by James Bandler Dec. 12,2022

https://www.propublica.org/article/google-human-tissue-jpc-military

Centers for Disease Control Museum on Atlas Obscura podcast

Visit a museum inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, which documents how public health officials have slowed the spread of disease through history.

Dec 2 2021

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7bGNhYFdLrb0miAOrF7U4H?si=YEsU_0-sTeyzch1JQQrg8w

FDA History Office Recruiting Museum Specialist

The US Food and Drug Administration's History Office is currently recruiting a Museum Specialist at the GS-09 level:  https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?k=museum%20specialist&p=1  The position is located at the FDA headquarters in Silver Spring, MD.  The announcement is only open this week, from 11/8-11/15. 

Civil War medical photos show up in the oddest places

520 Weeks – Moritat on "All-Star Western:" "Oh, You Can Draw Hats!"

By Brian Salvatore | October 4th, 2021
http://www.multiversitycomics.com/interviews/520-weeks-moritat/

Moritat:You know, the droop in the eye? I had reference for him too, and after that, it was easy. I've mostly used a lot of the old Mathew Brady Civil War photographs to kind of get that rugged kind of look, you know, color kind of slightly frayed gun belts.

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Medicinsk Museion reopens this week

THE MUSEUM OPENS AGAIN On Saturday 24 April, we will finally open the doors to our good and curious guests. Our staff is well on its way to sprucing up, putting up signs and getting ready for a safe and secure reopening. Remember bandages and Coronapas. Admission tickets must continue to be purchased in advance, and we will open ticket sales on Wednesday 21 April. Buy admission tickets here. // The museum re-opens April 24. Admission tickets must be purchased in advance. Please remember a face mask and your Corona passport.

What to do with the Morton Crania Collection?

What Should Museums Do With the Bones of the Enslaved?

As one museum has pledged to return skulls held in an infamous collection, others, including the Smithsonian, are reckoning with their own holdings of African-American remains.

By Jennifer Schuessler

April 20, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/arts/design/museums-bones-smithsonian.html

Morton Crania Collection to be partly repatriated

Penn Museum apologizes for its 'unethical' collection of human skulls and says it will repatriate remains of Black Philadelphians and others

• Stephan Salisbury The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
• Apr 12, 2021

https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/nation/penn-museum-apologizes-for-its-unethical-collection-of-human-skulls-and-says-it-will-repatriate/article_703c3728-5ca5-584f-a9fe-4af584df215f.html

Army medical history exhibit opens at Frontier Army Museum

Museum exhibit spotlights military medical milestones

Source:  ftleavenworthlamp.com

Author:  Katie Peterson

https://www.ftleavenworthlamp.com/community/2021/04/15/museum-exhibit-spotlights-military-medical-milestones/

To view the exhibit online with FAM OnCell, visit https://frontierarmymuseum.oncell.com/en/site-list-80713.html.

Dr Mary Walker comic book released

Groundbreaking Civil War Doctor Showcased

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

https://www.ausa.org/news/groundbreaking-civil-war-doctor-showcased

Some of Walker's possessions are in the National Museum of Health and Medicine

Responding to the Washington Post's mistaken criticism of Hammond

In this article,"The stench of colonialism mars these bird names. They must be changed" by Gabriel Foley, Jordan Rutter, published online August 4, 2020, the authors write,

"When we name an animal species after the person who first made it known to science, we are effectively honoring that person's contribution. ... Yet these honorific names — known as eponyms — also cast long, dark shadows over our beloved birds and represent colonialism, racism and inequality. It is long overdue that we acknowledge the problem of such names, and it is long overdue that we should change them." They follow that up by claiming, "William Alexander Hammond, once a surgeon general of the United States, asked U.S. soldiers to send him the bodies of indigenous people for comparative anatomy studies"

I sent a letter to the Post that they chose not to publish, so I'm posting it here:

Notwithstanding any validity of Foley and Rutter's argument about bird names, they are factually wrong in stating Army Surgeon General Hammond asked U.S. soldiers to send him bodies of indigenous peoples. Hammond founded the Army Medical Museum as the first federal medical research facility, holding human specimens (including skulls), photographs, and case histories from ill and injured Union soldiers, usually white males. Medicine at the time was unrecognizable to us - there were no ambulances, x-rays, antibiotics, or germ theory. Hammond proposed to produce a Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion and the 6,000-page, fifty-six pound History took twenty-three years to finish. By the 1870s, ethnography and anthropology were growing scientific fields, and the Museum had a pre-existing core of bored Army officers to draw on for donations. As early as 1869, the Smithsonian had proposed "an exchange of specimens which are now in possession of the Army Medical Museum, relative to Indian Archaeology and Anthropology, for specimens relative to human and comparative Anatomy in the Smithsonian Institution." Museum curator JS Billings renewed this exchange in 1884, 20 years after Hammond left Washington. In fact without Hammond and his colleagues, Foley and Rutter's field may have been much slower to develop. An entire book, Ornithologists of the United States Army Medical Corps, was written by EE Hume in 1942. Medicine, anthropology, and ornithology have all evolved since the 1860s, and while 'science never exists in a vacuum' as the authors note, it has to start somewhere.

Red Cross photo collection at Library of Congress

Behind the Scenes: an Archivist Draws on Myriad Experiences

July 22, 2020 by Melissa Lindberg

Below is an interview with Kristen Sosinski, Archivist in the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2020/07/behind-the-scenes-an-archivist-draws-on-myriad-experiences/

Melvin Shaffer interviewed on his WWII Army Medical Museum experience by local paper

Through his eyes: Green Valley man saw WWII as few did

• By Dan Shearer
  
• Green Valley News Jun 27, 2020
• https://www.gvnews.com/news/through-his-eyes-green-valley-man-saw-wwii-as-few-did/article_bffe155c-b89e-11ea-a9bd-b312fd0245b5.html

Tuberculosis in the African-American community photos at Library of Congress

Honoring African American Contributions in Medicine: The Black Angels

July 8, 2020 by Ellen Terrell

https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2020/07/black-angels/

One often doesn't think of LOC as a resource in Washington, since the National Library of Medicine is here.

From Anderson’s Holler – A World War II medical photographer’s story- available now

From Anderson’s Holler – A World War II medical photographer’s story- available now

A memoir of growing up in the hills of West Virginia and suddenly becoming a World War II medical photographer, with a clearance to go where others could not.

From Anderson’s Holler

By Melvin C. Shaffer

Dallas: DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Price $30

ISBN 978-1-878516-16-9 (paper)

          978-1-878516-17-6 (cloth)

June 25, 2020 – Green Valley, Arizona

In his first memoir, pioneering medical educator and Army Sergeant (ret.) Melvin C. Shaffer recalls his upbringing in rural West Virginia, his efforts to escape the narrow life of his peers, and his service in World War II. Foreshadowing his global wanderings, Shaffer’s first memory is of his father receiving a telephone call on his family’s wall-mounted crank telephone, announcing Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight arriving in Paris. As a boy, he developed a dual love of travel and photography. When World War II called, these passions fueled his success as a photographer in the Army’s 3rd Medical Museum and Arts Detachment (MAMAS). Trained and equipped as a medic, he also carried a full photography kit on assignments given him by the Army Medical Museum in Washington to document medicine and surgery – both advances and problems. First sent to North Africa, his own resourcefulness got him to wide-flung duty stations: Sicily, Salerno, Naples, Anzio, Rome, Florence, Poltava, Southern France, Dachau, and Berlin. Shaffer finds himself pulling soldiers off the battlefield while under fire, as well as documenting the new wonder drug, penicillin. His post-war civilian duties took him to Nuremberg and Tokyo on assignments related to Hitler’s bunker suicide and the atomic bombing of Japan.

Shaffer, retired after long careers at the Medical College of Virginia (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and the World Health Organization, has a folksy way of telling his story. Readers of Shaffer’s book will feel as though they are sitting across from him at the dinner table, but his tales are true and not tall ones. He says, “I tried to write the book in such a way that readers could experience the war as I did, that they could see and feel the power of things as they came to me and, occasionally, find the humor of it all.”

Now in his 90s, Melvin Shaffer still travels as much as he can and has never satisfied his wanderlust. He is writing a sequel to From Anderson’s Holler, covering his post-war experiences in medical education.

He is available for interviews and can be reached via email at melvinshaffer@gmail.com.

The book may be purchased from Southern Methodist University (SMU) at https://bit.ly/3eqaSSW

Shaffer’s personal photos taken during the war have been donated to SMU and can be found at https://bit.ly/3etfBDd