A Repository for Bottled Monsters: fetus

Showing posts with label fetus. Show all posts

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Newly-scanned accession record

Many of the accession records we're scanning are text documents only, but the third one I looked at this morning while doing the dreaded quality review held the image below. The record states only this:

Fetus, third trimester. Unable to determine what specimen demonstrates. [Upon request, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology could not provide any corresponding documentation for this case.]

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Accession of the day, March 9

I'm pretty sure that 6 years part can't be true.

A.M.M. [Army Medical Museum] No. 10156
Pathological Section

Washington, D.C.
March 9, 1891

Robinson Dr. C.B.
Veterinary Surgeon

Foetal bones, said to have been discharged from the uterus of a mare, about 12 years old. Owned by Senator J.S. Barbour of Virginia.

It is stated that she had not been put to a horse for 6 years.

History received verbally
Specimen received Mar. 8, 1891

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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Thursday, May 6, 2010

Newly-scanned accession record

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Accession of the day, March 9

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