existed as an Army installation, and still is administered under the authority of the Secretary of the Department of the Army, acting through The Surgeon General of that Department, but it is not now an organization of and for the Army alone. It is truly a triservice organization, established as such by the joint action of the Department of Defense and the Departments of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, with its broad policies determined by a Board of Governors, the members of which are the Surgeons General of the three Armed Forces.
It is thus a military organization, but one with so strong an infusion of the civilian in its makeup and mission that the medical profession—the term "medical" as here used being broad enough to include the dental and veterinary professions as well—has come to accept and rely upon the Institute's work and findings as a distinct, indeed a unique, contribution to the advancement of medical science and practice, civilian as well as military, throughout the Nation.
Nor are the services of the Museum-Institute limited to the boundaries of the United States, for they have followed wherever the American soldier, sailor, and airman have gone—to the western plains in the 19th century Indian campaigns; to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Canal Zone at the turn of the century; to Europe in the first war, known simply as the World War until a second world war of even greater dimensions took the American forces back to Europe, and to the continents of Africa, Australia, and Asia, to Japan, and the islands of the Pacific; and, at the halfway mark of the 20th century, to Korea.
From all these campaigns, as well as from the American Civil War during which the Museum was founded, lessons learned in the diagnosis and treatment of disease and trauma have been reported to the Museum-Institute in the form, principally, of specimens taken from surgical operations and from autopsies, together with the relevant medical history and records of each case.
The American Registry of Pathology
In addition to this flow of materials from military installations in all parts of the world, the Institute receives the organized cooperation of civilian medicine, acting through the American Registry of Pathology, an arm of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. The American Registry of Pathology, which now includes 27 constituent registries sponsored by the appropriate national societies of the various medical specialties, is both an arm of the National Research Council and also one of the four main operating departments of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Thus, the Registry
