only every possible variety of gunshot and arrow injury, but also those diseases which are more fatal than the bullet to an army in the field or in camp, has under the able superintendence of Surgeon General Barnes, and of Drs. Otis and Woodward, been most admirably arranged and catalogued * * *. Many of the specimens in this Museum are quite unique * * *. 26[1]
Varied Uses of the Museum
The Army Medical Museum became somewhat of a focus for the intellectual and scientific life of the Washington of the 1870's The fortnightly meetings of the Philosophical Society, the leading intellectual group of Washington, were held at the Museum, and the charter meeting of the now famous Cosmos Club, and its first election of officers, was held at the Museum on 13 December 1878. 27[2] When the American Medical Association met in the Capital in 1868, the Museum was the scene of a reception to its members given by The Surgeon General. A like courtesy was extended to the members of the National Academy of Sciences in 1870. Upon both occasions, as well as at other times, Dr. Woodward showed transparencies of some of the remarkable photomicrographs made at the Museum. Another notable visitor for whom The Surgeon General had a reception at the Museum, on 11 December 1872, was Prof. John Tyndall of London, whose studies in sterilization by heat had not yet reached their culmination but who, already, had dealt mighty blows to the theory of spontaneous generation. 28[3]
Scientific Skepticism As to Bacteria
Just a month before the reception at the Museum for one whose careful researches were to do so much toward establishment of the theory of bacterial infection, Dr. Woodward paid his respects to the theory, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Evening Star, published on 13 November 1872. "During the last few years," the letter read, "it has been a favorite speculation in certain quarters, that epidemic diseases are produced by the presence in the atmosphere of vegetable germs, so minute as to be visible only with the microscope. Considerable labor has been bestowed upon microscopical work in this direction, but the results which have been confidently announced from time to time by
