Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/103

The office rooms were graced with fireplaces and mantels, while the large library and museum halls were warmed by air passed over steam-coils in the basement and supplied by ducts, in addition to steam radiators. Corridors and stairways were heated by radiators.

Such was the building which was destined to be for nearly 70 years the home of the Army Medical Museum and its successors, the Army Institute and then the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and which after an absence of 7 years was to be reoccupied by the Museum and the overflowing activities transferred from the main building of the Institute.

A Shift in Emphasis

With a new home and a new curator, there was a shift in emphasis in the work of the Museum. The new concept of that work attributed to Dr. Billings in a dispatch of 18 September 1886, in the Medical News of Philadelphia, was as follows:

1. To illustrate the effects, both immediate and remote, of wounds and of the diseases that prevailed in the Army.

2. To illustrate the work of the Army Medical Department; models of transportation of sick and wounded, and of hospitals; medical supplies; instruments; etc.

3. To illustrate human anatomy and pathology of both sexes and of all ages.

4. To illustrate the morphological basis of ethnological classification, more especially of the native races of America, including anthropometry, and craniology.

5. To illustrate the latest methods and apparatus for biological investigations and the various methods of preparing and mounting specimens. 21^[1]

Surgeon General Moore, in a circular letter issued 15 September 1888, after the move to the new building was completed, "respectfully invited" the attention of all physicians to the fact that the Museum was "now arranged in a convenient fire-proof building which affords means for the proper preservation and display of specimens" and requested their aid in making it "a complete representative collection covering all branches of medicine." To that end, the circular outlined in great detail the types of specimens especially desired and the methods of "preserving them so as to make them most useful." 22^[2]

The "Old" and the "New" Museums

In keeping with this broader concept, there gradually developed a separation in the exhibits of the Museum, with lessening emphasis on the "missiles, weapons,

1. 21 Medical News, Philadelphia, volume 49, p. 330.
2. 22 Memoir of Joseph Janvier Woodward, 1833— 1884, by J. S. Billings. (Read before the National Academy of Sciences, April 22, 1885). War Department Records, Office of the Surgeon General. On file in National Archives.