A Repository for Bottled Monsters: monkeys

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Letter of the Day: April 13

813 North Charles St.

Baltimore

April 13/96

Dear Doctor Reed,

Many thanks for the monkeys which came through all right.

I enclose ck for $18.00.

I was so unfortunate as to lose one on the table and the other two were not over strong, but they managed to pull through a minor operation and are doing well now. Section of the corpus calllosium is rather too serious an operation unless an animal is in very good order and I shall have to keep that for animals in first class order. With many thanks for your courtesy & kindly interest

I remain

Very sincerely yours

E. Linden Mellus

#18.00 received from Dr. Reed

April 15, 1896

C.J. Meyers

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, April 13, 2010

Letter of the Day: April 13

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