A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Panama

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Have you ever heard of the Isthmian Canal?

My education is sorely lacking. I never heard the Panama Canal referred to as the Isthmian Canal, but saw a reference to it today when I went through a truly fascinating set of lantern slides from the William Gorgas era of the Canal. Here are two of several dozen that date from about 1902 to 1914. I wish I could scan them all.

This first one is a lovely hand-tinted lantern slide of Spanish laborers.

This second one is a chart (table?) showing a marked decrease in fatalities from various diseases, supposedly when sanitary measures were put in place- such as covering food, digging drainage ditches, oiling still bodies of water, etc. Note the Americans giving themselves a big old pat on the back.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

New book donated to museum

We just received The Tropical World of Samuel Taylor Darling: Parasites, Pathology and Philanthropy by E. Chaves-Carballo, Sussex Academic Press, 2007.

Dr. Chaves-Carballo used our collection a little bit to write this biography of the pathologist at Panama's Gorgas Hospital. We have Darling's pathological reports and autopsies of the hospital in OHA 177 Gorgas Hospital Autopsies and Pathology Reports, 1900s-1970s. Darling discovered the fungal disease Histoplasmosis (although according to the book he thought it was a protozoa) and a picture from us of a 1905 autopsy report of the first case is on p. 66. The autopsy records also showed how many cases of malaria (called estivo-autumnal fever) was killing people.

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, November 3, 2009

Have you ever heard of the Isthmian Canal?

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

New book donated to museum

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