Changes at the Museum
On 15 October 1913, Major Russell's service as Curator of the Museum ended. His further Army service included distinguished work during the First World War in the field of preventive medicine, as head of the Division of Laboratories and Infectious Diseases of the Surgeon General's Office. In 1920, Colonel Russell, as he then was, resigned from the Army to be commissioned a brigadier general in the Medical Reserve Corps, and to become director of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. He closed his career in medical science and administration by years of service as professor of preventive medicine at Harvard.
Succeeding Russell as Curator of the Museum was Maj. Eugene Randolph Whitmore (fig. 50). The new Curator was an academic graduate of the University of Wisconsin and had received his M.D. degree at the University of Illinois in 1899. In 1910, while on duty in the Philippines with the Board for the Study of Tropical Diseases, he had established the Pasteur Institute in Manila.
For almost two decades, during the administrations of three curators who had preceded Major Whitmore, the center of the Museum stage had been held by work in bacteriology and its related subjects of epidemiology and immunology. The resulting situation was recognized and described in a memorandum of 21 November 1913, addressed by Colonel McCaw, the officer in charge of the Museum and Library Division, to The Surgeon General of the Army. 4 [1]
"The Museum feature of the Museum and Library Division of the Surgeon General's Office," he wrote, "has for many years past been almost at a standstill. While the Army Medical School occupied a large part of the present building, the energies of the Museum staff in practically all the laboratory work were expended in teaching the class and in making original investigations, principally bacteriological, into questions of great importance for the Army at large and the Medical Corps in particular. The results have been so brilliant * * * that no excuse is needed for having temporarily ceased to develop the Museum feature proper — to wit, the collection, preparation and exhibition of specimens illustrating medicine in all its branches. This feature was necessarily neglected because of the preponderating importance of the brilliant work undertaken and carried out successfully."
"Many new specimens have indeed been accumulated; the Museum has been added to in some new directions and much obsolete material has been
- ↑ 4 Memorandum, Lt. Col. W.D. McCaw, to The Surgeon General. On file in historical records of AFIP.
