A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Congress

Monday, April 12, 2010

Letter of the Day: April 12

12 April 1956

Honorable Noble J. Gregory

House of Representatives

Dear Mr. Gregory:

Reference is made to your letter of 19 March and our reply of 21 March 1956 in which you requested a change be made in the exhibit label of the Lyon Quintuplets.

In accordance with the letter you enclosed from Mrs. Tilford and the birth certificate, the exhibit label has been changed to indicated the correct date of death of the quintuplet mother. The label now also includes the date of death of the father.

The exhibit, as it is now presented in our Museum, has been rephotographed. Prints of this photograph are enclosed as requested. May I thank you for your interest in this matter.

Sincerely yours,

W.M. Silliphant

Captain, MC, USN

Incl Photograph

c.c. Curator, Med. Museum

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

Monday, April 12, 2010

Letter of the Day: April 12

Get new posts by email:

FeedBurner FeedCount

Google analytics