Launching the Movement for a New Building
This future reclassification, it was hoped, would be made in a new building for the Museum and the Library, which Colonel Owen (fig. 53) had proposed, first to The Surgeon General in 1916, and later to the medical profession at large in an article published in the New York Medical Journal.[1]
The time seemed ripe for such a project when it was launched. A special Public Buildings Commission had been set up pursuant to a 1916 Act of Congress, to "ascertain what public buildings are needed to provide permanent quarters for all the government activities in the District of Columbia." This Commission, reporting in December 1917, included in its plans a site on the south side of the Mall between 4½ and 6th Streets, SW., for a building of 175,000 square-feet capacity, to house the Museum and the Library. Cost estimates for building and ground ranged from $2½ to $4 million. Preliminary plans for such a building, of classical design, were approved by the Fine Arts Commission as part of the move for a more beautiful Capital City.
The zeal of Major Shufeldt, seconded by Colonel Owen, led the major to write letters to the deans of the principal medical schools of the country; to state, county, and city medical societies; and to individual physicians and surgeons of prominence, soliciting their endorsement of the plan to provide, without delay, suitable quarters for housing the materials to be collected on the battlefields of Europe. With his letters, which went out in February and March 1918, he sent reprints of an article from his pen, published in the Medical Record of 2 February, in which he described the existing Museum as a "mummy" stagnating in its "sarcophagus" but retaining still the "essential life spark" which made possible "revivification" and future usefulness."[2]
The response to his letters was gratifying to him. The plan was endorsed by more than a score of medical college deans and faculties, a like number of medical societies, and three times as many individual practitioners, including some of the leaders in the medical world, representing in Major Shufeldt s somewhat overly optimistic opinion, "the voice of practically all the profession in America." The letters were bound in a handsome volume placed on the desk of The Surgeon General, and were reproduced for wider circulation.[3]
The new building was part of Colonel Owen's dream of the Museum of the future, which should be not "merely a collection of medical history of the United
- ↑ Owen, W. O.: The Army Medical Museum. New York Medical Journal 107: 1034-1036. 1 June 1918.
- ↑ Shufeldt, R. W.: War Material at the Army Medical Museum. Medical Record 93: 180. 2 February 1918.
- ↑ (1) Mimeographed copies of letters on file in historical records of AFIP. (2) Shufeldt, R. W.: The New Army Medical Museum on the Map. Medical Review of Reviews 24: 596-599. October 1918.
