teacher, to be sure, but a teacher of the past. It exemplified, with its many thousands of specimens, our knowledge of military medicine and surgery as practiced during the Civil War * * *. In the presentation of its specimens, casing, labeling, lighting and in numerous other matters and details, it is decidedly antiquated; and while it is, upon the whole, tidily kept, it is by no means an exponent of what a live, growing functional museum of the present time should be * * *. It required a World War to awaken this museum * * *. This somnolent institution of yore gradually came out of its lethargic state, and took on new life."
The source of this new life, according to Major Shufeldt, was the appointment to the Museum staff of several men who had had "long experience in museum affairs and management." The effect of "three or four heroic doses of vim injected into the vitals of this medical Morpheus, this sleepy old Museum" he described as "a revolution, a mild upheaval, and a readjustment with an increase in the Museum's staff in various old departments and the establishment of the new ones." 18[1]
The sharp cleavage between the "new" and the "old" museums was exemplified in the scheme of cataloging adopted by the new custodian of the collections. All specimens in the Museum at the time of the declaration of war against Germany were left undisturbed, with their accession numbers unchanged, and were designated as Series A, while items received after 6 April 1917, were accessions under new and separate numbers, designated as Series B. This maintenance, in the same museum, of two separate series of numbers for materials of essentially the same kind was deemed by Major Shufeldt to be "radically absurd," but it was adopted as a temporary measure until such time as it might be possible to revise and reclassify the older materials accumulated over a period of more than half a century. When the time should come to merge all the exhibition materials into "one homogeneous collection," he felt that "no small part" of the Series A materials would have to be set aside and that all of it would be reclassified along "divisional lines * * * very differently drawn. Science will take a hand in the arrangement, and by the application of true principles of museology, material will be exhibited in an orderly and scientific manner— properly cased, labeled, and classified * * *." 19[2]
- ↑ 18 Shufeldt. R. W.: Value of the Army Medical Museum as a Teaching Factor. Proceedings of the American Association of Museums, 1918, p. 209.
- ↑ 19 Shufeldt. R. W.: On the Classification Adopted for the Material Constituting the Collections in the Army Medical Museum of the Surgeon General's Office at Washington. Medical Review of Reviews 24: 728. December 1918.
