Figure 54.—Colonel Owen's "dream" of a new Museum and Library building, as pictured by Lt. Morris L. Bower, October 1918.
believe that a mere collection of anatomical and pathological curiosities for exhibit to the curious and the prurient should be permitted. A medical museum should be, in my judgment, a great library of history and pathology, where the student of medicine may come and study the history of disease and its pathology, for the benefit of himself, his patients, and his nation."[1]
With a war to be won, however, and with money, materials, and manpower in short supply, the time was not propitious for the construction of new permanent buildings in Washington, and the project for a new home for the Museum joined the other deferred dreams—not to be realized for yet another 40 years, and then in an entirely different form and at a different place from the proposals of 1918 (fig. 54).
The unrealized dream of a new building, however, in no way diminished the drive of the Museum in expanding its activities to meet the demands of the war of 1917-18. "The present war," said Major Shufeldt, "has had the effect of waking up the old-time spirit in this erstwhile slumbering institution * * *. It is now an active medical concern, reaching out in all directions and absorbing every possible means to become a medical research and teaching center in the broadest sense of those words."[2]
