Wednesday, April 21, 2021

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

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

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

Friday, April 16, 2021

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.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Dr Mary Walker comic book released

Groundbreaking Civil War Doctor Showcased

Monday, August 17, 2020

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.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

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/

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

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.

Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

A Repository for Bottled Monsters

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