The accumulations to which Dr. Mayo referred were the result of strenuous efforts to interest and instruct medical officers in the field, both in the camps at home and in the American Expeditionary Forces overseas, in the exacting work required in the proper preparation of anatomical and pathological specimens and forwarding them to the Museum in Washington. Despite such efforts, "most of the good material, and all the first-class specimens received at the Museum, with few exceptions, were brought there by men sent from the Museum to get them" — thus repeating, half a century later, the experiences of the staff of the early Museum in the Civil War.
For this, there were plenty of real reasons as well as good excuses. Summing up the situation, the eminent Dr. James Ewing of the Cornell University Medical School in New York, who is widely regarded as the "father" of oncology in the United States, and who, serving the Army as a contract surgeon in 1918, was assigned to the staff of the Medical Museum, said that this business of collecting pathological material was "one of the least urgent matters claiming attention in an army whose task was to win the war and win it quickly." A succession of epidemics, both at home and in the AEF, and the care of the wounded in the AEF overtaxed the laboratory forces and left "neither time nor force to collect suitable pathological specimens and preserve them according to modern methods." Furthermore, Dr. Ewing said, the "number of men in the American medical profession trained in the methods of the pathological laboratory, and especially in the methods of museum preparation, proved to be extremely small, and few of these were available to the army." 4[1]
Making Pathologists in a Hurry
The shortage of pathologists led to a certain amount of shortcut improvisation, such as the way in which Maj. C. Judson Herrick of Grand Rapids, Mich., found himself in charge of the pathology department of the Army Medical Museum. As Dr. Herrick tells the story, he was commissioned as a major on 18 January 1918, and charged with the business of assembling personnel for assignment to Army hospitals to collect neuropathological materials for delivery, with their accompanying records, to the Museum. In April, when he had rounded up about 20 enlisted men with some training in histology and pathology, his original order was rescinded and shortly thereafter he was ordered to report for duty at the Medical Museum. Major Herrick continues:
- ↑ 4 Ewing, James: Experiences in the Collection of Museum Material from Army Camp Hospitals. International Association of Medical Museums Bulletin VIII, December 1922, p. 27. [Hereinafter cited as Ewing.]
