A Repository for Bottled Monsters: mutilés

Sunday, May 17, 2009

More on the Red Cross and Mutilés

I came across a reference that's hosted on the WWW Virtual Library website. (Now there's a website that will cost you hours. What a great reference tool.) It's called A Statement of Finances and Accomplishments for the period July 1, 1917 to February 28, 1919, by the American Red Cross, Washington, DC, October 1919. It contains this paragraph:

The relief of French mutilés included the operation of a school farm, the manufacture of portrait masks and artificial limbs, the operation of an educational and publicity service, and assistance to French institutions offering commercial and industrial courses to mutilés. It is estimated that 6s,000 [?] of the 600,000 crippled French soldiers were reached by the Red Cross.

It has a table that shows what kind of services were provided:

I'm surprised that only 94 men received "portrait masks." I would have expected a higher number.

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 17, 2009

More on the Red Cross and Mutilés

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