A Repository for Bottled Monsters: agriculture

Friday, May 14, 2010

Letter of the day, May 14

[Numbered Correspondence 659]
Copy

Edge Hill, King George Co., Va.
May 14, 1895

The Army & Navy Medical Museum,
Washington, D.C.

Gentlemen in charge:-

I enclose you a root that was plowed up by a farmer in this county a few days ago. I am unable to determine what it is. I shall be very glad if you will kindly inform me what it is, etc. The farmer said there was nothing growing above the ground. He found three of the roots together, one of them was about 3 times as large as the one I send.

Any information you can give me will be highly appreciated.

Yours very respectfully,
(Signed) F.F. Ninde, M.D.

May 15, 1895, original transmitted with root to Hon J. Sterling Morton, Secretary of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.

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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Friday, May 14, 2010

Letter of the day, May 14

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