as to be "valuable in the instruction of the general public in hygiene and preventive medicine." 7[1]
No amount of shuffling and reshuffling of exhibits within the confines of the 30-year-old building occupied by both the Library and the Museum could produce enough space to permit either a proper display of the exhibit materials or an effective use of the study collections (fig. 63). It was estimated, indeed, that proper display and exhibit of the World War materials alone would take up the entire room of the building, while the whole of the Museum's materials would fill a building twice the size of the one occupied by both the Library and the Museum. Accordingly, The Surgeon General earnestly recommended construction of a new building at as early a date as was possible. 8[2]
Plans for a Great Medical Center
The first concrete step toward such a new building was the appropriation by the Congress, on 11 July 1919, of $350,000 "for the purchase of land contiguous to Walter Reed General Hospital, District of Columbia, 26.9 acres more or less, for the final location of the Army Medical Museum, the Surgeon General's Library, and the Army Medical School." Supplemental to this appropriation, was an additional grant, on 22 September 1922, of $44,109.22 "for the site of Medical Museum and Library." 9[3]
The project contemplated a great medical center, with the School, the Library, the Museum, and the Hospital in mutual support of one another. The plan as projected was never to be carried out fully. The Army Medical School moved from its rented quarters on Louisiana Avenue to its new building, in suburban Washington, in September 1923. The Museum, later transmuted into the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was to remain in its downtown location for yet another 30 years before moving the greater part of its activities to the Walter Reed site; while the Surgeon General's Library, under its new name of the National Library of Medicine, was to stay on Independence Avenue for still another decade and then move — not to Walter Reed, but to the grounds of the National Institute of Health.
At the time of the purchase of the land contiguous to Walter Reed, however, there were plans for a new building for the Museum in which The Surgeon General could carry out more effectively the idea of making available
