Figure 81.—"Wounds" for training purposes. A. Moulages, produced by the Medical Illustration Service, represent types of wounds which might be expected.
Bulletin 116, issued on 18 November 1944. When applied to soldiers in the field, the moulages were startlingly lifelike (fig. 81).
More than 4,000 pieces, representing 11 different wounds, were prepared by the Medical Illustration Service, but none of the World War II moulages are to be found in the Museum today. In late 1944, after the moulage-making job was completed, the laboratory was cleaned up and turned to other uses, but apparently no attempt was made to accession a set or two or to salvage the original patterns or the plaster of paris molds. Instead, it is likely that all the excess moulage materials were included in a general cleanup of the Museum, in which nine truckloads of materials of various sorts were hauled off to nearby Army posts in Virginia and dumped. Diligent search of the basement of the Institute building and of Chase Hall—a temporary building into which the Museum proper was moved in April 1947—failed to turn up any of the missing moulages of this particular lot. The use of moulages in training was continued, however, and they are still being made by the Medical Illustration Service.[1]
- ↑ (1) Typewritten memorandum in AFIP files dated 1 March 1949, signed R.A.S. (the initials of Maj. Ruell A. Sloan, Curator, Army Medical Museum, in 1949). (2) The production of these moulages at the Army Medical Museum is described in: Clarke, Carl D.: Rubber Moulages for First Aid Training. Journal of Technical Methods 25: 91-101, December 1945.
