The name "registry," which came to be applied to this form of cooperative medical endeavor, probably grew out of a case of suspected bone sarcoma in a patient of Dr. E. A. Codman of Boston. The patient's family wished to know
of cases of recovery from what was, or was supposed to be, bone sarcoma, and the treatment which had resulted in a cure. Informally, Dr. Codman called on his personal acquaintances in the profession for such light as they could throw on cases, and their cures, if any. The first cases collected were placed in the Registry in July 1920, less than a year before the Museum and the Academy entered into their arrangement. Although the original patient for whose benefit the information had been gathered had died, it was realized that the information itself was too valuable to lose. Dr. Codman, therefore, took up the matter with Dr. James Ewing of New York and Dr. J. C. Bloodgood of Baltimore, with whose cooperation the Registry was informally organized. Other surgeons and pathologists became interested in the project, which was to be taken over, as part of its work, by the American College of Surgeons.
On 3 January 1922, Dr. Codman, using a bound, blank book with the printed heading "Register," began the diary of "The Registry of Bone Sarcoma." The primary object was to "keep an up to date list of all supposed-to-be sarcoma cases" by registering "every case (1) of which we have a brief history and an X-ray picture or a slide or tissue. (2) certain interesting or unusual bone tumor cases which have been confused with sarcoma."
The objectives were not greatly different from those of the almost contemporary and still nameless arrangement between the Museum and the ophthalmologists, and the basic idea of the operation was so nearly the same and so well contained within the idea of a registry of pertinent information in individual cases, that it was most natural to call the Museum-Academy arrangement by the same name of a "registry." Particularly is this the case since Dr. Codman was a friend and patient of Dr. Verhoeff, chairman of the cooperative committee of the Academy, 14[1] to whom he might well have given the idea of calling the new alliance between military and civilian medicine a "registry."
Working in a New Direction
At any rate, and regardless of the name, the new movement was destined to give a largely new direction to the work of the Museum. At the first annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, held after the new relationship between that organization and the Museum,
- ↑ 14 Zimmerman. Transactions of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology, 65 (1961) pp. 62, 69-71.
