the Army Medical Museum was "now prepared to accept * * * pathological specimens of interest and preserve them after the method of Kaiserling, which is intended to retain the natural coloring * * *. In the absence of the Curator, any specimens turned over to Dr. Healy, the Anatomist, will be properly cared for." With reference to this circular, Lamb observed with some asperity that he, the pathologist of the Museum, had been using the Kaiserling process since 1899 "so that there was nothing really new in the circular, except the assignment of
the Anatomist instead of the Pathologist to receive pathological material." The asperity was doubtless heightened by the fact that the anatomist had been on the Museum staff only 6 months, while the pathologist had already served 40 years, and had contributed more specimens to the Museum's collections "than any other has, or ever will, so contribute." 14[1]
The Devotion of Dr. Lamb
The devotion of Dr. Lamb to the interest of medical science extended beyond life into death. In his last will and testament, drawn in July 1928, in the last year of his life, he left specific instructions for the performance of an autopsy, even prescribing the formula for the solution in which his brain was to be preserved for transmission to the Wilder collection at Cornell University, and directing that "such other organs as it may be desirable to preserve," including the skeleton, be "donated either to the Army Medical Museum, where I gave 54 years of service, or to the Howard University Medical School where I gave 50 years," first as professor of materia medica, but for 45 years as professor of anatomy. Dr. Lamb designated Maj. George R. Callender, then the Curator of the Medical Museum, to perform the autopsy, with Dr. Aleš Hrdlička of the National Museum as supervisor. Both were old and valued friends. To make the autopsy and examination of the organs more meaningful, Dr. Lamb filed with his will a complete statement of all illnesses and injuries from which he had suffered, including the "many times" he had had "infection from post-mortem examination" of which he had made "about 1,500 on nearly all diseased conditions." 15[2]
The devotion and determination of Dr. Lamb helped to keep alive an inter- est in anatomy and pathology in a period of 30 years after 1883, when interest in microorganisms and parasite carriers of disease overshadowed that in morbid anatomy. In the latter years of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th, the fields of bacteriology and related studies were filled with "ardent
