Applying the Graphic Arts to Medicine
One of the new directions in which the Museum was "reaching out" in the war years of 1917 and 1918 was in the extension of its informational services through the wider use of the graphic arts—photographic, pictorial, and plastic.
Medical illustration in the Armed Forces of the United States was not something new in 1917. It had been developed during the Civil War period, when the Museum staff included such medical artists as Hermann Faber and Edward Stauch, and such clinical photographers as William Bell and E. J. Ward, whose graphic plates are vividly reproduced in the "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion," in addition to Doctors Joseph J. Woodward and Edward Curtis, who pioneered in photomicrography. The tradition of these pioneers had been carried on by Dr. William M. Gray in photomicrography, and by Dr. J. C. McConnell whose careful drawings of mosquitoes were useful in the practical application to mosquito control of Walter Reed's discovery (fig- 55).
The World War I counterpart of these earlier illustration services was called the Instruction Laboratory of the Medical Museum, a name bestowed to distinguish it from the division of the Museum devoted to work in pathology.
Figure 55.—This laboratory of the nineties was that of Dr. William M. Gray, who carried on the tradition of achievement in photomicrography established by Dr. Woodward and Dr. Curtis.
