Leprosy exhibit opens at museum...

...In coordination with the new PBS film Triumph at Carville (which I saw an earlier preview of and enjoyed a lot). John Wilhelm and Sally Squires did a good job telling the history of Hansen's Disease (the now-preferred term) sufferers and the isolation they were forced into in Carville, Louisiana. Information specifically on the exhibit should eventually be on the Museum's website.

Women's History Month Program at NMHM

Today Tom Goehner, Manager of Historical Outreach at the American Red Cross Headquarters gave a slide presentation about the role of women in the ARC--Clara Barton, Jane Delano, Minnie Pearle, Marlee Matlin, Liddy Dole, etc. The program included some great images including this one of the ARC Gray Ladies at Walter Reed Hospital (ca. 1918). The Gray Lady service began at Walter Reed in 1918. Their uniform consisted of a gray dress and veil. They served as hostesses and provided recreational services for the recovering wounded at Walter Reed. The soldiers affectionately called them "Gray Ladies" and the name stuck. The Gray Lady service continued to serve hospital patients until the 1960s.

Evidently the ARC Archives has some 30,000 images in its collections.

Get Your Links Here

A few links that have been piling up the last few days:

• DC Confidential posted another blog about the Museum! Read it. (Thanks, DC Confidential!)
• Medgadget posted on two interesting topics: Using Mirrors to Treat Phantom Pain, and Accu-Circ for a Safer, Happier Bris. The latter is linked to, well, because I couldn't resist. The image of the device and its intended use... The first link seemed relevant as Museum staff often get a chance to interact with wounded and recovering servicemembers in and around the Museum on the campus at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
• Street Anatomy links to a new blog called Revealed, about scientific and medical illustration.
• Information technology challenges are part of the price of doing business in today's rapidly evolving tech environment, and we're certainly not unused to dealing with those sorts of challenges on a daily basis. Musematic posted a few bullets from a Wall Street Journal story that illustrated some interesting parallels.
• And PreservationNation, a blog from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, offers an update on the Army's progress with repairing, or not, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

Graduate Student Symposium 2 May 2008

LIVE FROM THE Washington Society for the History of Medicine, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, and the Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health:

Graduate Student Symposium 2 May 2008
8:30 am - 5:00 pm
FREE to REGISTRANTS

Lister Hill Visitors Center
National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike, Bldg. 38A
Lunch, refreshments, snacks provided.
Registration: email Judy Chelnick chelnickj@si.edu
NIH directions, access: www.nlm.nih.gov/about/visitor.html

Plenary speaker
Angela N.H. Creager
Department of History
Program in the History of Science
Princeton University

PROGRAM
8.30-9.00 Coffee

9.00 -9.15 Introductions
David Cantor, President, Washington Society for the History of Medicine.
Elizabeth Fee, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
Robert Martensen, Chief, Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health.

9.15-10.15 Plenary
Angela N.H. Creager, Dept of History & Program in the History of Science, Princeton University.
Artificial Radioisotopes in Biomedicine, 1935-1955: From Gift Exchange to Commodification in the Atomic Age.

10.15–10.30 Coffee

10.30-12.15 What we’re working on. Why we’re interested. How things have changed since the last Graduate Student Symposium
A chance for all of us, graduate students and historians working in the field, to talk informally about our research projects, interests, theoretical frames, methods, etc.
Format: 5-10 minutes per participant (including discussion).
Up to 3 slides on memory stick allowed.

12.15-1.15 Lunch

1.15-2.45 Publishing Your Research
What do publishers/journals want? What not to do. How to write a good book proposal.
Mary E. Fissell, Editor, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Randall M. Packard, Editor, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Jacqueline Wehmueller, Executive Editor, the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robert Martensen, Chief, Office of NIH History, National Institutes of Health.

2.45-3.15 Coffee

3.15-5.00 Archival Research
A discussion about the problems of archival research from the points of view of archivists, curators, and historians.
Paul Theerman, Head, Images and Archives, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
Michael Rhode, Chief Archivist, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC.
John Swann, Historian, FDA History Office, Rockville, Maryland.

5.00 Retire to the Rock-Bottom Brewery, Bethesda.

Washington Society for the History of Medicine blog

Who knew the Washington Society for the History of Medicine had a blog?

Signs and rumors of signs

I went to the National Zoo on Sunday, a beautiful day to be out. Apparently half of all Washington area residents and their visitors agreed with me because they were there too. I bought a membership while there, more to get free parking than anything else (pay $40 for a membership to save $12 on parking....) and could have gotten a map of the zoo for free with the membership, but decided not to because I was counting on signs. Uh, no. I was there almost 5 hours and didn't see one sign for a restroom. When I was ready to leave I looked for signs that would send me back to parking lot A but they almost nonexistent. Even overview maps of the zoo weren't at every major intersection as I expected and I saw just two of those when I was actively looking. I found my way back only after asking an employee, and finally saw a sign for the lot when I was next to the exit.

This made me think of the New York Historical Society. I posted some pictures I took there on my Flickr page (isn't this shameless self-promotion) and someone commented that she too enjoyed the museum but was frustrated by the lack of labels. I'd noticed the same thing when I was there. Here's a photo I took but I can only guess what some of these things are. There were no labels. It would have been helpful to even have something basic like "Sewing Tools."



So what does this mean for those of us who work in museums/zoos/historical societies? It seems such an elementary idea, but basic labeling is important. How else does a visitor put things in context, understand the significance of the object, or find her way to the loo?

Nationalism, racism or a time that tried men's souls?

Here's a picture from the MAMAS collection that Kathleen ran across today:


Unpleasant, but typical of war photography, right?

Now here's the picture with the caption scanned in:


The caption reads, "This is no horror picture for these are Good Japs, sinister minions of Tojo who were caught in a murderous cross fire of machine guns and rifle bullets as they attempted to make one last [fanatical] break through [our] lines at Tanapag Harbor, Saipan Island, on July 7th. This picture will supply the warlords of Japan a rough idea of what lies ahead and serve to remind them that the road to Tokyo is becoming a pretty un-healthy place for Tojo-san and his warriors." W-CPA-44-6755 July Laudansky. 10/1/1944.

As a policy, we use the caption that the picture comes with, although we'll add additional information in brackets if necessary. This caption? It's unpleasant, but it's probably not propaganda as it was never meant to be seen except by the Museum staff who received it. Unfortunately Mr. Laudansky was almost certainly on Saipan taking photographs when these Japanese soldiers attacked (to the last man), so I think we can understand this caption as an expression of something more than either nationalism or racism too. I'd like to hope that we as a society have moved beyond some things, but if I was in Laudansky's shoes, I have no idea what I'd write. I know I'd have been terrified though.

Although in our numbering series for the Museum & Medical Arts Service, I think this photograph is a re-photograph of by MAMAS staff of Luadansky's picture for the Central Pacific Area Signal Corps group.

Blogging and Museums

As you can tell, we're making this up as we go along, but our colleagues at Medical Museion @ University of Copenhagen have had their blog Biomedicine on Display up for a while and they've got a post up on Museums and Blogging that's worth looking at.

March of Dimes Archives

I picked up a piece of polio history the other day. This printing plate for a comic strip on a fundraising campaign.

I haven't printed it yet although we're trying, but flopping and inverting the picture lets you see it:


When we get it printed, a scan will be available from the Museum. In the meantime, it sparked a letter from the March of Dimes archivist which included this information on their archives. David's given his permission for me to repost the information.

March of Dimes Archives

The March of Dimes Archives is the official repository of non-current records of the March of Dimes. The mission of the Archives is to identify, acquire, preserve, and provide access to records documenting the history of the March of Dimes. The records consist of published and unpublished information in a variety of media created, received, and maintained by the March of Dimes and its predecessor (The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) in the conduct of business. Our collections include correspondence and other textual holdings, photography, film and videotape, electronic records, medical artifacts, posters, and memorabilia. The March of Dimes archivist oversees the proper organization and storage of its collections and provides both staff and the general public with information about its holdings.

Our archival collections document the history and achievements of one of the most successful voluntary health organizations in history. Highlights include the letters of Franklin Roosevelt and Basil O’Connor (first president of the National Foundation); the medical program to eradicate polio and the Salk vaccine field trial of 1954; fund-raising events such as the Mothers March, Waldorf-Astoria fashion shows, and WalkAmerica; the National Foundation Expanded Program (1958) that launched birth defects prevention as a mission objective; the career of Virginia Apgar, creator of the Apgar Score for evaluating newborns; perinatal health initiatives, including Toward Improving the Outcome of Pregnancy, a plan for the regional development of maternal and perinatal health services. Our archival resources are used by March of Dimes staff at the national office and chapters and by researchers from all walks of life who study, publish, and produce films and exhibits on epidemic disease, the history of medicine and public health, vaccines and vaccination, entertainment and political celebrities, volunteers and volunteerism, American popular culture, women’s history, disability studies, and much more.

March of Dimes archival collections include:

• Salk and Sabin Polio Vaccine Records
• Medical Program Records
• Fund Raising Records
• Film, Video, and Photography Collections
• March of Dimes Publications
• Chapter Organization and Activities Records
• Salk Institute for Biological Studies Records
• Basil O’Connor Papers
• Virginia Apgar Papers

Need assistance with historical questions? For information, please contact:

David W. Rose, Archivist
March of Dimes
1275 Mamaroneck Avenue
White Plains, NY 10605
914-997-4221
drose AT marchofdimes.com


You can also see the polio pictures we do have in the Museum, and we've got the film, Born in the White House, about the March of Dimes.

Telemedicine of the Third Kind

This article talks about another type of telemedicine - one in which patients load their symptoms and treatment into an online database to aid research, and possibly themselves.

"Practicing Patients," by THOMAS GOETZ, NY Times Magazine March 23, 2008.
PatientsLikeMe, an Internet start-up, creates information-rich communities for the chronically ill. Is it the next step forward in medical science — or just a MySpace for the afflicted?

Atomic veterans

We're asked fairly regularly for material relating to nuclear explosions, mostly photographs, of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or later tests. An article about Canadian veterans and their attempt to get benefits can be seen at "Troops exposed in nukes testing fight for aid," By Barry Brown, Washington Times March 23, 2008.

Another article related to forensic ID exhibit

Here's another article about another country and cultures take on identifying its dead soldiers - "Anonymous Korean War Dead Still Await Trip Home," By CHOE SANG-HUN, NY Times March 23, 2008.
Known as the “enemy cemetery” in South Korea, it contains the remains of communist fighters or infiltrators North Korea has not reclaimed.

I believe our exhibit on identifying US war dead is planned to open in early summer although I'm not involved in it.

See Inside Beta People

Medgadget linked to it, and since our Museum features actual anatomical specimens, I thought maybe our readers would be interested in this new site BodyMaps: A Human Atlas. The site sometimes took a moment to resolve on the screen after selecting a different system, but that doesn't put a dent though in its coolness factor. Enjoy.

When one site links to another, that's when the magic happens

So for the first draft of this post, as I described to Mike offline the other day, I had thought that I would lace some interesting information about the Museum's web site traffic with some witty commentary, even a few jokes. I get jokes. After torturing that draft for a while longer this afternoon, I'm just going to get to the point. So, if you were looking for some self-deprecating humor or hilarious observations about the state of the PR profession, too bad. Maybe another day.

I thought our eight or nine readers might enjoy this sampler of links gleaned from our Web site statistics:

Among the sites offering links to us with some significant traffic so far this month: a Wikipedia page on hairballs that links to our virtual exhibit; two different but related pages about the Lincoln assassination; a government site about pandemic flu planning; a 2005 Medgadget post about our Human Body Revealed exhibition; a tourist-focused site called Things to Do. To all those sites, and others, we appreciate the business.

If I find any other statistical goodies, I'll be sure to post those, too.

Museum News Hopefully Worth Noting

A few news items from museums near and far:

• Baghdad's National Museum, a treasure trove of artifacts from the stone age and Babylon to the Assyrians and Islamic art, will not reopen when renovation of two of its galleries is completed in a few months, an official said. (AP)
• Field Museum exhibit shows that mythical creatures didn't just spring from imagination (Chicago Tribune)

A little Googling led to some other related links: Here is the Wikipedia page on the National Museum, and here is what appears to be a nonprofit group interested in helping the Iraqis. And here is the link to the Field's new exhibit.

Enjoy.

Wounded vets rebuilding their lives

Walking around Walter Reed, even when not directly involved in patient care, one sees a lot of people who are working to get their bodies and their lives reconstructed. Here's an article about one of them - "Wounded Vet Again Tackles Basic Training; Swimmer Among Those Trying Out For Paralympics," By Amy Shipley, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A01.

Vaccination, herd immunity, and selfishness

Two main papers ran articles on vaccination today. Let's take a look at them. Remember I'm speaking for myself here as our disclaimer notes.

"Vaccine Failure Is Setback in AIDS Fight: Test Subjects May Have Been Put at Extra Risk Of Contracting HIV" by David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A01 talks about the bitter conclusion.

"This is on the same level of catastrophe as the Challenger disaster" that destroyed a NASA space shuttle, said Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, and head of the Institute for Human Virology in Baltimore.

This seems to put off a prevention of AIDS for the foreseeable future, meaning that millions especially in Third World countries will continue to die:

"None of the products currently in the pipeline has any reasonable chance of being effective in field trials," Ronald C. Desrosiers, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University, declared last month at an AIDS conference in Boston. "We simply do not know at the present time how to design a vaccine that will be effective against HIV."

Meanwhile, theoretically well-educated people refuse to vaccinate their children in the US - read "Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines," By JENNIFER STEINHAUER, New York Times March 21, 2008.

Let's pull out some quotes from this article:

SAN DIEGO — In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, and the other three were too young to receive vaccines.

Now, let's see what the Centers for Disease Control says about measles - "How serious is the disease? Measles itself is unpleasant, but the complications are dangerous. Six to 20 percent of the people who get the disease will get an ear infection, diarrhea, or even pneumonia. One out of 1000 people with measles will develop inflammation of the brain, and about one out of 1000 will die."

Hmmm. Let's see what a parent in the article has to say:

“I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good,” said Sybil Carlson, whose 6-year-old son goes to school with several of the children hit by the measles outbreak here. The boy is immunized against some diseases but not measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis. “When I began to read about vaccines and how they work,” she said, “I saw medical studies, not given to use by the mainstream media, connecting them with neurological disorders, asthma and immunology.”

Nice. So she's willing to risk her children to a 1 in 1000 risk of death because of something she read that the mainstream media (and the FDA and CDC) refuse to believe. So far, nobody has been able to prove that vaccination increases the risk of autism, which is what most people who fear vaccination seem to be most concerned about.

“The very success of immunizations has turned out to be an Achilles’ heel,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

So what happens to herd immunity, or the phenomena in which even if an individual's vaccination doesn't take, one's protected by the fact that a virus can't infect anyone around him?

There is substantial evidence that communities with pools of unvaccinated clusters risk infecting a broad community that includes people who have been inoculated. For instance, in a 2006 mumps outbreak in Iowa that infected 219 people, the majority of those sickened had been vaccinated. In a 2005 measles outbreak in Indiana, there were 34 cases, including six people who had been vaccinated. Here in California, six pertussis outbreaks infected 24 people in 2007; only 2 of 24 were documented as having been appropriately immunized. A surveillance program in the mid ’90s in Canada of infants and preschoolers found that cases of Hib fell to between 8 and 10 cases a year from 550 a year after a vaccine program was begun, and roughly half of those cases were among children whose vaccine failed.

The current John Adams miniseries on HBO shows the lengths that Abigail Adams was willing to go to inoculate her children. Here's some pictures of smallpox, which was the first disease prevented by vaccination to show why she, and George Washington who vaccinated the Continental Army, went to such lengths.



Woman with smallpox with vaccinated infant (the opposite of the situation in the NY Times article in which the parent is protected, but the child is not).

You can live in a former Army base

Years and years ago, the Army expanded Walter Reed Army Medical Center by purchasing a former girls school known as the National Park Seminary. Parts of the school buildings were whimsical recreations of European architecture. You can buy a couple of books about the site, or you can just buy a home there. I'm not thrilled that these are becoming condos, but the Army didn't maintain them. In the late 1980s, I mounted a rescue operation of a large painting of psychiatric patients during World War 2. The painting hung on the ground floor of that building you see in their ad, but water leaking from three stories up had damaged it. The Borden Institute paid to have it restored to use in their Textbook of Military Medicine on psychiatry, and it hangs in the Museum now.

Medical museum links on Morbid Anatomy

Morbid Anatomy's got a list of links to medical museum's running down the left side of the blog. That should be useful feature. The new thing they've added is a list of museums on flickr, running down the right side.

A Civil War plastic surgery article I helped on

I just ran across this - "The first civil war photographs of soldiers with facial wounds," Journal of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Springer New York, ISSN 0364-216X (Print) 1432-5241 (Online), Volume 19, Number 3 / May, 1995. This was largely written by my late friend Dr. Blair Rogers, although I can still pick out the parts I wrote - mostly the photo history. They've even put up the full text as a pdf that can be downloaded. Blair really pushed me into writing about the Civil War photographs, and I appreciate his efforts (perhaps more now than I did in the early 1990s.)