The Army Medical School Moves Out
Almost a year later, on 2 February 1910, Curator Russell "respectfully invited" the attention of the officer in charge of the Museum and Library Division of the Surgeon General's Office, who was then Col. Louis A. LaGarde, to the history of the School's occupancy of quarters in the Museum and Library building. [1]
The School, he recited, was established in 1893 in "two rooms which belonged to the Army Medical Museum, and Museum exhibits were put into the store-room to make way for the School. Each year as the institution has grown, the same encroachment on the exhibition and work rooms of the Museum has followed, and the growth of the School has been entirely at the expense of the Museum. This method * * * has reached its climax, since the Museum has absolutely no more room of any sort to give it * * *. As the School has grown the activities of the Museum have been more and more limited until we have arrived at a state in which something must be done."
Something was done, and on 7 June 1910, Curator Russell informed The Surgeon General, through Lt. Col. Walter D. McCaw, then the officer in charge of the Museum and Library Division, that "the Army Medical School equipment is now being moved out of this building into the building at No. 721 Thirteenth Street, N.W., which has recently been turned over to the Medical Department by the Quartermaster's Department." The move would be completed, he added, "towards the end of the present month" (fig. 49). The move of the School relieved somewhat the space pressure on the Museum, but at the same time it created other problems. Major Russel was in charge of, and did personally much of the technical work of, both the teaching laboratory of the School and the laboratory of the Surgeon General's Office, which carried on the work of the Museum in the fields of pathology and bacteriology, including the new procedure of making typhoid vaccine. Major Russell was also on the faculty of the Army Medical School and was to be moved, with his teaching laboratory, to the new school quarters. Unless both laboratories were under the same roof, he advised The Surgeon General, it would be practically impossible for him to continue to do the work of examining water supplies, blood samples, and pathological materials required of the Surgeon General's laboratory. Authority was sought, therefore, and secured, for the removal to new quarters at the School of both laboratories, along with two experienced men to do the "considerable" clerical work.
- ↑ 'Letter, F. I'. Russell to L. A. LaGarde, 2 February 1910. On file in historical records of AMP.
