A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Fisk and Arnold

Monday, March 15, 2010

Letter of the day, March 14

A day late. Oops!

Fisk & Arnold,
Manufacturers of
Artificial Limbs, &c.
No. 3 Boylston Place,
Boston, Mass., March 14, 1899.

Dear Sir:
We ship to-day by Adams Express the samples of old devices requested in your favor of March 7th. The steel skeleton is that of the “Drake” [A.M.M. No. 2503 Misc. Sect.] leg manufactured between 1840 & 50 and the small model is a perfect miniature of the “Palmer” [A.M.M. No. 2504 Misc. Sect.] leg manufactured between 1860 & 70. The skeleton we willingly give to the Museum but for the model we charge you just what it cost us.

Yours very truly,
Fisk & Arnold

To Dallas Bache
Col. & Asst. Surgeon General U.S.A.
Washington, D.C.

[Specimens received March 15, 1899.]

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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Monday, March 15, 2010

Letter of the day, March 14

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