National Health Museum

The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the "National Health Museum," which doesn't exist except as a website, is now looking beyond Washington for a home. The NHM was established in 1988 as the National Museum of Health & Medicine Foundation, but eventually decided in the early 1990s that they didn't want to be affiliated with the existing medical museum anymore and went on their own. So in two decades, they've created a website and now are looking to move out of DC - "After a 10-month search, he said Atlanta remains in the running with Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Museum officials will announce a selection later this year, [Mark Dunham] said."

See "National health museum might call Atlanta home," by CRAIG SCHNEIDER. Published on: 03/26/08. Thanks to Jen Heilman for the tip.

Library of Congress has a blog now too!

The Library of Congress has a blog now too! And they're posting Hitler's Treasures there, but I'm noting it just to say - we were here first! Their blog is by Matt Raymond, one of their PR guys apparently.

Influenza subject to the endangered species act?

MIS 58-15573-69 - Influenza Ward, Sagamihara Hospital, Japan, August 9, 1957.

Well, probably not, but the Post had this interesting article - "Researchers Chart Flu's Global Journey: Strains Arise in Asia, Die in S. America," by David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 17, 2008; Page A04 - about how strains go extinct in South America this year, but new ones arise in Asia to replace them. The genetic analysis of the influenza virus continues to amaze.

Speaking of Flickr

As I do in the next post... here are three I posted this week. I won't steal Mike's thunder. I'll let him show you the ones he sent to Flickr himself.

SC495871



SC344909



SC 41726 Just All Eyes, Brother (This one had 102 views overnight, and makes me think of my son the Marine. He said all through boot camp the drill instructor would yell out, "Did I say eyeballs?" if he caught the recruits looking at him.)

Flickr bragging

I did a quick count this morning on our three Flickr accounts. (Come on already, Flickr, with our Commons account!)

Here are the beautiful numbers:

Otisarchives1: 42,001 (198 images)
Otisarchives2: 21,381 (199 images)
Otisarchives3: 9,998 (180 images)
For a total of 73,380 views on 577 images.

We're not Library of Congress or the National Archives, but I think we do pretty well. In case you need a reminder of where our accounts are, or a refresher for new posts, feel free to take a look.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04/, and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04/

Prescription safety

I had a couple of prescriptions filled at Costco today. I usually get my scripts filled elsewhere so I was kind of surprised to see what Costco has done to increase safety in prescription drugs. The label has all of the usual information but also includes a list that says what form the drug is (tablet, capsule, etc.), what its shape is, its color, and any printing on it. I think that's brilliant. How simple and how smart. I have a relative that takes a lot of prescriptions and at one time kept the open bottles in a shoe box which of course was overturned. This would have been of great help in sorting out the mess on the bottom of the box. (We won't even talk about the tops not being on the bottles.)

National Library of Medicine lecture - "Doctors' Ladies," or: Another Look at Chinese Diagnostic Manikins

We have two of these on display in our Museum, not the ones in the following picture, and the NLM is about 15 minutes away.

Male and female anatomical mannequins (not Chinese), made of ivory. Length of figures 6.5 inches. View showing the figures open. Reeve62752

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE,

History of Medicine Division Seminar

Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 2-3:30pm

Lister Hill Visitor's Center Bldg 38A, NLM Bethesda, MD

"Doctors' Ladies," or: Another Look at Chinese Diagnostic Manikins

Chinese anatomical diagnostic manikins are among the many interesting artifacts found in medical history collections. Ivory female figurines were used by Chinese doctors during a house call. The Chinese custom decreed that a woman must not be physically examined by a male physician. The female patient marked the area of pain or discomfort on the doll and passed it through a curtain without actually being seen by
the doctor.

Christine Ruggere,

Johns Hopkins University

All are Welcome

Note: The next history of medicine seminar will be on Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 2-3:30pm in the Lister Hill Visitor's Center, NLM's Bldg 38A. In a joint program with the Office of NIH History, Edmund Ramsden, London School of Economics and Exeter University, will speak on "Finding Humanity in Rat City: John B. Calhoun's Experiments in Crowding at the NIMH."

Sign language interpretation is provided. Individuals with disabilities who need reasonable accommodation to participate may contact Stephen Greenberg at (301-435-4995), e-mail greenbes@mail.nih.gov
, or the Federal Relay (1-800-877-8339).

Due to current security measures at NIH, off-campus visitors are advised
to consult the NIH Visitors and Security website:

http://www.nih.gov/about/visitorsecurity.htm


Stephen J. Greenberg, MSLS, PhD

Coordinator of Public Services

History of Medicine Division

National Library of Medicine

National Institutes of Health

Department of Health and Human Services

301-435-4995

Forensic paper redux

Mike has posted about a recent paper written by Lenore Barbian and me that used the Civil War skeletal collection. Here's the abstract and title page image from the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

This paper reports on the gross appearance of the initial osseous response following cranial gunshot wounds. A total of 127 adult crania and cranial sections were analyzed for four types of bone response: osteoblastic, osteoclastic, line of demarcation, and sequestration. In general, no osteoblastic or osteoclastic response was noted during the first week. This response was followed by an increasing prevalence of expression after this time. By the sixth week postfracture both osteoclastic and osteoblastic activity was scored for 100% of the sample. Further, our observations suggest that the line of demarcation may establish the boundary between the living bone and bone not surviving the fracture. Sequestration appears to be a long-term event and was scored as present well past the eighth week of healing. The osseous expression of infection following fracture was also considered.

For those not versed in the forensic anthropological lexicon, let me decipher it for you. The Civil War skeletal collection is unique in many ways, but for this study it was the documented date of injury and date of death that allowed us to determine the time elapsed following injury. We examined skull sections of 127 Civil War soldiers looking at the way in which the fractured bone responds to injury over time-- and this is the only collection in the world where this could be done.

Forensic anthropologists can use the information in this study when they have a case that could involve survival after a traumatic injury. Some of the data may also be useful in looking at child abuse cases or human rights abuse cases.

Chest-compression-only CPR

Wired.com, one of my favorite news sources, reported a couple of weeks ago about the American Heart Association giving the OK for chest compressions only, in unexpected collapse of adults. The AHA says skip the mouth-to-mouth, which most people are unwilling to do anyway because of the "yuck factor;" quickly call 911 and give 100 compressions a minute until the paramedics arrive.

The more you know, the more you know

Mike and I were talking today about just what our digitization project has accomplished. This was in response to a meeting we'd attended where it was brought up that many researchers today think if something's not on the Internet, it doesn't exist and/or it doesn't matter (it must not be significant if it's not worth digitizing). For those of you reading this blog, I can imagine you either shaking or nodding your head - you've heard this before or just can't believe people think that way. But I heard it in library school so it must be so.

Anyway, this segued into talking about the first collection we scanned as a part of this project, in 2005 - the MAMAS collection. That stands for Museum and Medical Arts Services. I blogged briefly about MAMAS way back in this blog's infancy but, in short, MAMAS photographers were dispatched to the European and Pacific theaters during World War 2 to document the medical treatment the troops were getting. We scanned a dozen or so boxes of photos and realized we had very little from Europe. Didn't know where they were but they weren't in this batch of boxes.

Fast forward to late 2007. Over the years the archives has rescued countless documents that were being discarded for whatever reason. We've begun to dig through them and in the sort we realized that what we had were several hundred MAMAS photos from Europe. Happy day, and exciting. They're now in the process of being cataloged and will be scanned some time this year.

And so, this is the source of this post's title. If we hadn't scanned the first, "known" batch of MAMAS, we would never have "known" that these several hundred (and most likely will top 1000) photos were also part of that collection.

Indiana Medical History Museum now on Flickr

Check out all the photos from the Indiana Medical History Museum. There's some cool stuff here.

US war casualty statistics...

...can be hard to come by, so this site that Steven Solomon passed along is interesting.

Mark Your Calendar--National Hairball Awareness Day

It's April 27, if it's not already on your calendar. Make plans now for your salute to the bezoar--the museum is. We will host a special exhibition of hairballs. One of our human hairballs is already on display in our Human Body exhibit. To celebrate NHD, we'll display some of our veterinary specimens--they are impressive. Cats get hairballs and so do humans (trichobezoars). Ruminant animals do, too (cows, llamas, goats, etc.). They once were thought to be a universal antidote to any poison. Turns out that they just might work on arsenic. Here's a pic of one our human hairballs that is currently on display. It was surgically removed from a 12 year-old girl who had been eating her hair for 6 years.

The Army Reads Blogs - do they do it at work?

Wired.com reports that the Army reads blogs just to make sure that what's being said about it and its goings-on is the truth. Do they have to do it on their own time, from home? We can't read what bloggers are saying about our museum from our Army computers, and because of that have to print out what's being said about it from our own computers at home. I guess there are rules and there are rules.

Post on changes for Walter Reed soldiers

To read about some of the changes about patient care at the hospital, see "The Young Lions of Able Troop: To the Cadre on the Front Lines Of Improving Care at Walter Reed, The Challenge Can Rival Combat," By Steve Vogel, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, April 10, 2008; B01.

AFIP's educational offerings

Dr. Mullick, director of the Pathology Institute, sent out this email today -

Congratulations to the Department of Medical Education and particularly to Mr. Carlos Moran, MS, Department Chair, for a most impressive achievement. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) accredited the Institute's continuing medical education program for six years. In addition, the ACCME awarded five commendations, further underscoring the exemplary nature of the AFIP education program. It is also interesting to note that only 8% of the many hundreds of ACCME accredited providers nationwide receive a six year accreditation, and even fewer do so with more than four commendations. This is truly and outstanding achievement and I would like to personally thank Mr. Moran and the Department staff whose dedicated efforts continue to strengthen the educational activities of the AFIP.

For many years the AFIP's conducted courses - the Museum's offered paleopathology, forensic anthropology and helped out in others. The radiology course is attended by most radiologists in the US I believe.

Longtime Archives research Beth Linker lectures on World War 1 in NYC

Medicine in Wartime

War and medicine share an ancient and intimate relationship, and the history of military medicine is a lively meeting-place for scholars from many fields. This year, the New York Academy of Medicine's Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health is dedicating four public lectures to the topic of medicine in wartime - specifically, the interplay between war, medicine and society. Our series explores the poisonous ideologies that fester into wars and the development and testing of deadly new weapons to fight them; the social and infrastructural stresses and fractures war brings; and the challenges of helping war's maimed and damaged soldiers find peaceful occupations when the fighting is over.

On April 24, Beth Linker will present the third lecture in the mini-series:

Medicine in Wartime III
Limb Lab: Getting Amputee Soldiers Back to Work in World War I America Beth Linker, PhD, University of Pennsylvania Sponsored by the New York Academy Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health

Reception at 5:30 p.m.; Lecture at 6:00 p.m.

Looking across the Atlantic in the spring of 1917 at the ravages of the Great War, the U.S. Council of National Defense prepared for the worst, envisioning its own country re-"arming" hundreds of thousands of limbless American soldiers. The Council thus ordered the Army Surgeon General's Office to create a "Limb Laboratory" where orthopedic surgeons would standardize and construct affordable prosthetic arms and legs for returning disabled veterans. The choices that Limb Lab orthopedists made concerning which type of artificial limbs best suited America's maimed veterans stemmed not only from medical theory and practice, but also from deep-seated political, cultural, and economic concerns shared by many other social progressives at the time. Defining masculinity as the ability to earn wages, orthopedists believed that artificial limbs were necessary to make disabled soldiers whole again, bringing them into their rightful place as "industrial citizens." With this aim in mind, the Limb Lab emphasized the utility of artificial limbs, claiming that amputee men should have "tool-like" appendages rather than anatomical replicas in order to be competitive with able-bodied men in the job market.

Beth Linker, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching interests include disability, American health policy, bioethics, public health, gender and health, and the history and sociology of medicalization.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information about NYAM programs in the history of medicine, click here , write history@nyam.org , or call Chris Warren at 212.822.7314.

Save the Date!

Thursday, May 8, 2008, 6:00 PM (with reception at 5:30) Susan Smith, The Annual Lilianna Sauter Lecture, Medicine in Wartime, Part IV: "Human Experimentation with Mustard Gas in World War II"

-----
This event is free and open to the public. To register, visit http://www.nyam.org/events.

For more information about NYAM programs in the history of medicine, visit our website at http://www.nyam.org/histmed, write history@nyam.org, or call 212.822.7310.

Historical programs at NYAM are supported by the Friends of the Rare Book Room. Please join the Friends! Download a membership form at http://www.nyam.org/initiatives/docs/FRBR_Renewal.pdf.


THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 1216 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10029

Christian Warren, Ph.D.
Historical Collections
New York Academy of Medicine
1216 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029
Phone: 212-822-7314
Fax: 212-423-0273
email: cwarren@nyam.org

Change in mammogram technology causes change in diagnosis

Read this article to see how a change in technology is driving changes in diagnosis -

In Shift to Digital, More Repeat Mammograms
By DENISE GRADY
New York Times April 10, 2008
As doctors learn to interpret digital mammograms, they are more likely to request second tests.

Kidney transplantations

The first kidney transplant took place not quite sixty years ago in 1950, but became more common after anti-rejection drugs appeared in 1964. Yesterday, doctors at Johns Hopkins transplanted six at one time, into five needy people. Historians of medicine (and all types actually) caution against viewing history as a simplistic march of progress, but sometimes progress is progress, no?

New forensic paper based on Civil War specimens

Healing following Cranial Trauma by Lenore Barbian and Paul Sledzik (one of our bloggers) has appeared in the Journal of Forensic Sciences March 2008 issue. The two former curators of the Museum's anatomical section examined 127 Civil War soldier's skulls for evidence of healing after their wounding. The issue is only available online to subscribers.