CHAPTER VIII
The "Pickle Factory" Period
Five medical officers of the Army— Colonels Valery Havard, W. H. Arthur, and Walter D. McCaw, and Majors Carl R. Darnall and Frederick F. Russell, all of whom had special acquaintance with the work, the problems, and the situation of the Army Medical Museum or the Army Medical School, or both — met on 31 March 1909, to discuss the need for a new and suitable building for the School.
Their conclusion, arrived at unanimously, was that there was such a need. "The rooms which this school now occupy in the Museum and Library building are inadequate and unsuitable," they said in a memorandum of their discussion. 1[1] "They have never been more than a makeshift * * * crowded and insufficient * * *" as well as encroaching upon the space and facilities desperately needed by the Library and the Museum.
Two possible remedies were agreed upon: renting a building in Washington or "simply the carrying out of the policy already decided upon" of providing a suitable building for the school in proximity to the Walter Reed General Hospital, then nearly completed. The conferees agreed that "the second solution seems decidedly preferable," as the next step in the normal development of the general plan, and strongly urged that $250,000, the estimated cost, "be included in the next estimates to be submitted to Congress, and that special efforts be made to induce Congress to appropriate it."
With a lively sense of the uncertainty of congressional action, however, the conferees recommended that if it should be found that "there is no disposition on the part of Congress to appropriate the necessary sum for the building" on the site already selected for it on the grounds of the Walter Reed Hospital, inquiries should be made so that "a suitable structure may be found and, if possible, rented."
- ↑ 1 Memorandum, Office of The Surgeon General, 31 March 1909. On file in historical records of AFIP.
