A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Public Health Service

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Lexie Lord's 'Condom Nation' reviewed by Post

Alexandra Lord was the US Public Health Service Historian after John Parascandola, and there must be something about that position, because they both wrote books about sexually-transmitted disease education. Lexie's is reviewed in today's Washington Post -

Book review: Susan Jacoby reviews 'Condom Nation' by Alexandra Lord
By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, January 10, 2010

CONDOM NATION
The U.S. Government's Sex Education Campaign From World War I to the Internet
By Alexandra M. Lord
Johns Hopkins Univ. 224 pp. $40

One slight note about the review - there seems to be some confusion about the various Surgeon Generals. There are four SGs in the US government - Army, Navy, Air Force and Public Health Service. The article is illustrated by a poster from the US Navy, a poster by the US Army is quoted in the review, and the book itself is on the PHS Surgeon General of course.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Leprosy exhibit opens at museum...

...In coordination with the new PBS film Triumph at Carville (which I saw an earlier preview of and enjoyed a lot). John Wilhelm and Sally Squires did a good job telling the history of Hansen's Disease (the now-preferred term) sufferers and the isolation they were forced into in Carville, Louisiana. Information specifically on the exhibit should eventually be on the Museum's website.

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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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Lexie Lord's 'Condom Nation' reviewed by Post

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Leprosy exhibit opens at museum...

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