learn these changes. Even if a definite cause for cancer should be found, it will still be necessary to recognize the earliest change indicating its presence."
In his outline of the American Registry of Pathology, he referred to the project for a new building for the Museum and the Library at the Army Medical Center, adjacent to the Walter Reed General Hospital as "being before the Bureau of the Budget. In the new building, as contemplated, there will be rooms available for research by scientists not on the Museum staff. Laboratory facilities will be available and all collections of the Museum will be more accessible for research."
The dream of the new building was not to come to fruition for yet another quarter of a century after the American Registry of Pathology was set up by the National Research Council, an agency of the National Academy of Sciences, which was authorized to receive and administer any funds contributed to the Registry. Through the channel thus opened, the medical specialty societies could conveniently make financial contributions to the work of the Museum in pathology.
Organized Civilian Cooperation
These contributions have continued over the years, but the greater contribution by far has been the active cooperation of the specialists in the registry work in what has been aptly called an "effective synergism." 5[1] The way in which the Museum and the civilian specialists worked together was well described in the 1927 report of Maj. Gen. Merritte W. Ireland, The Surgeon General of the Army, as follows:
In the operation of a registry, case reports accompanied by specimens are sent in to the registrar. Slides of the specimen are prepared, and when the diagnosis is in doubt the entire case is circulated to a group of pathologists. The diagnoses furnished are studied and the case is classified by the registrar in cooperation with a committee appointed by the society conducting the registry. In so far as possible, only cases living at the time of registration are accepted and every case is followed to its conclusion. In this way large numbers of cases are brought together, followed by subsequent reports to their decease, and classified and studied to determine the character of the disease process, the course of the disease, and to evaluate the methods of treatment.
The emphasis of the registries, it will be noted, was on living cases to be followed to the end rather than on specimens resulting from post mortem cases important as they are. "The registries," said the 1927 report of The Surgeon
- ↑ 5 Dart, Raymond O.: The Army Medical Museum. International Association of Medical Museums Bulletin 27: 13, 1947.
