A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Brain Awareness Week at the NMHM

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Brain Awareness Week at the NMHM

For the ninth year, the NMHM will host a Brain Awareness Week (BAW) program for middle school students. This year over 800 students from DC, VA and MD will visit the museum between March 10 and 14 to participate in hands-on activities with area neuroscientists to learn more about the brain. Hopes are to inspire the next generation of neuroscientists.

Included in our Partners in Education are several of the National Institutes of Health. This year the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is the lead institute from NIH. They will coordinate the efforts of NIA, NIAAA, NIMH and NIDA. NINDS has just launched a new web page that describes the program.

The NMHM also has a new web page about BAW, including our new BAW mascot.

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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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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Brain Awareness Week at the NMHM

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