Remains of war
By Michael E. Ruane
Monday, May 21, 2012
The smashed bullet that killed Lt. Henry H. Waite of the 6th Maine regiment is there. So is the one that claimed Pvt. James Bainham of the 125th New York. And the one that killed Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States.
Scores of deformed slugs pulled from the flesh of the Civil War’s victims sit like grimy jewels in these glass cases, not far from trays of splintered bones and punctured skulls damaged in the conflict.
There’s more than war in the Defense Department’s refreshed and relocated National Museum of Health and Medicine, which will celebrate its grand reopening in Silver Spring on Monday.
The arthritic skeleton of Peter Cluckey sits in its wooden chair, as it has for decades, a macabre but longtime feature of the 150-year-old museum of medical oddities and scientific history.
The right forearm of Confederate Capt. Henry Wirz, which was cut off after his execution for war crimes, is on display in a container of preservative.
And the eerie-looking head and neck of an unidentified man, with the skin peeled away, reveals the tangle of muscle and sinew beneath, like the bundled wiring of an electrical device.
But much of the famous museum is about the impact of war and medicine’s valiant struggle to understand and repair its damage.
The museum had been located for 40 years at a hard-to-reach site on the campus of Northwest Washington’s old Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
With the hospital’s recent relocation to Bethesda, the museum last year moved to a modern, new building adjacent to the Army’s Fort Detrick/Forest Glen Annex, on Linden Lane in Silver Spring.
It reopened temporarily in the fall but had been closed since January as new exhibits and galleries were prepared. Now fully accessible to the public, it is set for a VIP reopening ceremony and open house Monday -- the sesquicentennial date of its founding. Admission is free.
“This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity,” said Tim Clarke Jr., the museum’s deputy director for communications. “We get to celebrate our anniversary . . .
while removing some of the barriers that might have been in place before. And do so with brand-new exhibits.”
The museum has 25 million artifacts, Clarke said, including the world’s largest collection of microscopes, a soldier’s notebook that stopped a bullet and a metal breastplate that failed to.
Many more objects are on display than before, and some are probably being seen publicly for the first time, he said.
On Wednesday, as a skeleton rested on an examining table in a state-of-the-art conservation lab, museum officials previewed the new exhibits.
The Army Medical Museum was founded May 21, 1862, a year into the Civil War, when Surgeon General William A. Hammond directed Union doctors to gather “specimens of morbid anatomy . . .
together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed.”
There was no shortage of material.
Surgeons shipped amputated legs, feet and arms, cleanly sawed off at one end, often with bullets embedded in the bone. Specimens were sent in from the battlefields of Antietam, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg.
One became a “perennial favorite,” the museum said. It was the shattered leg of Union Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, who had it sent to the museum in a velvet-lined box after he was wounded by a cannonball at Gettysburg.
After the war, the eccentric Sickles came to the museum to visit his leg annually on the anniversary of its amputation, Clarke said.
Skulls were sent in, too.
One, bearing the awful evidence of a projectile that went in one side and out the other, came from a member of the heroic African American 54th Massachusetts regiment, which was almost wiped out in a battle in 1863.
The museum also gathered the tools of the surgeons who sought to save soldiers’ lives.
There is an array of saws, forceps, mallets, tweezers and scalpels, along with an item called Heine’s chain osteotome. It is a small bone saw with an ivory handle, like an egg beater’s. “It was not widely used,” Clarke said.
One set of instruments, from the time of the War of 1812, looks like a set of farming implements.
In the wake of all the sawing came the need for artificial limbs, and the galleries contain samples of prostheses made of wood, metal and plastic.
One especially grim section details some of the horrific facial injuries suffered in war. A set of large, black-and-white photographs shows a Civil War soldier who lost his chin and the remarkable work that attempted to fix the injury.
Among the museum’s most famous artifacts is the bullet that killed Lincoln, which was recovered during his autopsy in the White House, and several locks of his hair. After the Civil War, the museum was located in Ford’s Theatre, the site of the assassination, for about 20 years, according to Clarke.
Other high-profile items include a vertebra from slain President James A. Garfield with the hole made by the assassin’s bullet, slides of President Ulysses S. Grant’s tumor and the skeleton of one of the first monkeys in space.
Modern times saw the advent of test dummies. One was Chauncy, the General Electric “copper man,” a World War II-era test device that looks like an ancient Greek idol. Chauncy, who smiles faintly from a display case, could be heated or cooled to test military clothing. And then there are the blast-test-dummy legs. They look like a department store stocking display, except for the bullet wounds marked “entrance” and “exit.”
One modern artifact seems especially evocative. It is part of the floor of Trauma Bay II from the tent hospital at the U.S. air base in Balad, Iraq. The surface is gouged from the legs of surgical gurneys and is stained with antiseptic and blood, Clarke said.
It bears a large Roman numeral II marked in duct tape.
“Bay II was known as the place where the worst wounded were brought,” Clarke said, and the place where it was said that “the most American lives were saved or lost since [the war in] Vietnam.”
A Gory Way to Learn About Your Health
By Amy Orndorff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 24, 2008
Have you ever played that Halloween game where you're blindfolded and told to stick your hands in bowls that contain eyeballs (peeled grapes), tongues (pickles) and teeth (uncooked popcorn)? It might not be convincing, but the idea -- being close to things that were once inside a person -- is downright creepy.
That is the same shiver-inducing, stomach-churning sensation that one feels while walking through the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In 1862, the museum was established, in the words of Army Surgeon General William Hammond, to be a collection of "all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable."
What Hammond considered to be valuable can be disturbing to those not in the medical field. There are tongues, lungs and countless bones. A brain, complete with spinal cord running down an absent spine, is suspended in fluid.
Although some of the exhibits might be on the grim side and not for the squeamish, this is also a museum about the triumphs of medicine, especially military medicine. From the days of the American Revolution there has been a constant pursuit of making sure soldiers wounded in battle were healed as completely as possible. An exhibit about prosthetics features a leg that two prisoners of war secretly fashioned for a third POW while they were held in a Japanese camp during World War II.
A lot of things can go wrong with our bodies (from gunshot wounds to asphyxiation, they all seem to be included in the exhibits), but after touring the museum it is easy to come away with a better appreciation of everything your body does to keep you going.
Two theaters show films about medicine and health, including the continuously running documentary "Triumph at Carville." It tells the story of how a colony of people with leprosy and the nuns who took care of them were able to overcome social stigmas related to the disease and even develop a treatment.
Besides the movies and graphic medical exhibits, the museum also has other benefits. Want your kid to avoid smoking? An exhibit shows the lungs of a coal miner and iron miner vs. the lung of a smoker. Want them to drink milk to build strong bones? There is an exhibit about brittle bones. Want them to appreciate their bodies more? Have them explore the human body using a computer program, the Visible Human Project.
So skip the pickles this Halloween, and check out the real thing.
Where is it? From the entrance to Walter Reed Army Medical Center at Georgia Avenue and Elder Street NW, take your first right and follow the road to a four-way stop. The museum is to your right in Building 54. Adults should be prepared to show ID at the entrance to the campus and the museum.
When should I go? The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day except Dec. 25. Tours are at 1 p.m. on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month. Special Halloween activities are planned for Saturday.
How much? It's free!
The best of the rest: The museum also displays the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, a stomach-shaped hairball removed from a young girl and the tongue and throat of a person who choked to death on dentures. The museum also houses the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of microscopes.
