A Repository for Bottled Monsters: human reproduction

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Letter of the Day: May 23

JWS/HP/go

23 May 1963

Mrs. Ruby M. Taylor
Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School
McElderry and Caroline Streets
Baltimore 5, Maryland

Dear Mrs. Taylor:

The Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has an exhibit on human reproduction that should be of interest to your biology classes. The exhibit shows a series of normal embryos and fetuses. A study is presently being conducted on the abnormal specimens, but they will not be on display for several months.

It is hoped that your students will derive much benefit from the embryology, anatomy and other medical exhibits.

Sincerely,

John W. Sheriden
Colonel, MSC, USA
Deputy Curator

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, May 23, 2010

Letter of the Day: May 23

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