Thursday, December 4, 2025

The Maude Abbott Medical Museum's website

I got a very kind note from a staff member today, so for the first time in years, I popped over to their website. It's a nice, sleek guide, and I'm looking forward to checking out their newsletters. It's so nice to see photos of the museum; when I tried to find it about 35 years ago (sigh), I had no luck at all. Dr. Richard Fraser really revitalized the collection.

If anyone can recommend a good paper on Abbott, her role in the International Association of Medical Museums, and her work with the Army Medical Museum, I'd be grateful. I was starting to look into that via the IAMM's journal but never finished that research. I literally just moved cubicles again at my current job and was able to put my books on a bookshelf for the first time since COVID so I got to see all the medical museum histories again.

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

A history of The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion is online

Over 20 years ago, I wrote a couple of papers - ""An enduring monument" : Philadelphia's contributions to The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-1888)" lecture for "Philadelphia, the 'Mecca' of North American Medical Publishing" session, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, London, 10-13 July 2002 and "'The Extent of These Materials is Simply Enormous': The Creation and Publication of The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion from 1862 to 1888," lecture for the American Association for the History of Medicine, 2 May 2004. These evolved into a version prepared for print that was never accepted for publication. This fall I was surprised to see that a good version isn't online anywhere, so I attached the slides from the original talk, and uploaded it to the Medical Heritage Library at

'The Extent of These Materials is Simply Enormous': The Creation and Publication of The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion from 1862 to 1888

https://archive.org/details/mshwr-final

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

Pages

Thursday, December 4, 2025

The Maude Abbott Medical Museum's website

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

A history of The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion is online

'The Extent of These Materials is Simply Enormous': The Creation and Publication of The Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion from 1862 to 1888

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