has not been recognized its existence is generally allowed, and many of the conditions needful to its development have been demonstrated." 2[1]
All in all, the History merited the high praise which it received, even from such an outstanding and keenly critical authority as the great Rudolf Virchow, who wrote:
Whoever takes up and reads the extensive publications of the American medical staff will be constantly astonished at the wealth of experience therein found. The greatest exactness in detail, careful statistics even in the smallest matters, and a scholarly statement embracing all sides of medical experience are here united, in order to preserve and transmit to contemporaries and posterity in the greatest possible completeness, the knowledge purchased at so vast an expense. 3[2]
The Museum and the Army Medical School
With the completion of the Medical and Surgical History (fig. 35), there ended the last major link tying the Museum to its Civil War origins. True, the majority of its specimens were the result of Civil War wounds and sickness, and the interest in Civil War specimens persisted, but there was the strong infusion of more recent and different pathological material and, more importantly, there was the new direction of thinking typified in the launching of the Army Medical School.
The idea of a medical school for Army personnel had been put forward as early as 1862, first informally by Brinton and his associates, and later by Surgeon General William A. Hammond in his report of 10 November to the Secretary of War, in which he recommended "an army medical school, in which medical cadets and others seeking admission into the corps, could receive such special instructions as would better fit them for commissions, and which they cannot obtain in the ordinary medical schools * * *". 4[3]
Like so many other of the excellent recommendations in this report, nearly all of which were ultimately adopted, the idea was rejected at first, to remain dormant for over 30 years until, in 1893, President Grover Cleveland appointed Lt. Col. George Miller Sternberg (fig. 36) to succeed Charles Sutherland as
- ↑ 2 Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. Medical History. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888, pt. III, vol. I, pp. 492, 493.
- ↑ 3 Hume, Edgar Erskine: Victories of Army Medicine: Scientific Accomplishments of the Medical Department of the United States Army. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943, pp. 152, 154, quoting, Morgan, William Gerry: Contributions of the Medical Department of the United States Army to the Advancement of Knowledge (With Particular Reference to Fields Not Directly Connected with the Practice of Military Medicine). The Military Surgeon 66: 779-790, June 1930.
- ↑ 4 Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army, 10 November 1862.
