give up the shell by which he was struck and the loose angle of jaw for the Army Museum," adding, "Keep every specimen you can."
Some of the operating surgeons, through ignorance or misunderstanding of orders, believed that the specimens resulting from their operations were their own to dispose of as they saw fit. One such instance was that of Surgeon R. B. Bontecou, of the hospital at Beaufort, S.C., who, while on duty in the Peninsula, collected between 70 and 80 preparations which he gave to Dr. Thomas M. Markoe of New York. Brinton wrote to the recipient of the gift, explaining that "all the specimens collected by medical officers belong to the national museum" and calling for the return of those which had been transferred to him by Surgeon Bontecou "under the mistaken impression that he possessed the right to part with them." There is no record of the receipt of anything from Dr. Markoe, but eventually Dr. Bontecou contributed 101 specimens. And then there was at least one case of outright theft of specimens by "the men who had charge of the dead house" at a general hospital, and the sale of the specimens to a New York physician.[1]
In spite of early indifference and the very real difficulties of collection, the specimens came in, even though the case histories which were to have accompanied them were frequently lacking. Enough material had been received by the end of 1862 to warrant the issuance of a small catalog in January 1863 (fig. 7). In a covering letter to Surgeon General Hammond, the Curator noted that "all the contained specimens," numbering 1,349 objects, had been collected since the Museum's establishment in August and the number was "being daily augmented." Of the objects cataloged, 985 were surgical specimens, 106 were medical, and 103 were missiles, "for the most part extracted from the body." Through the cooperation of the Ordnance Department of the Army, the Museum was enabled to display also a series of projectiles for small arms, field and heavy guns, and a set of the bayonets in use in the United States and foreign countries.
This first catalog of the Museum was "offered simply as a numerical list of the objects" in the collection with no attempt to classify the various injuries or to describe in detail the preparations included.
Of the nearly 1,000 surgical specimens listed, all but a handful were the result of gunshot wounds, and the vast majority of those were from the
- ↑ (1) Record of John Hill Brinton's Action in the Matter of the Military Medical Museum, pp. 11, 22, 52, 59. On file in historical records of AF1P; letters of 28 July, and 7, 9, 12, 18, and 19 August 1862. (2) Lamb, Dr. D. S.: A History of the Army Medical Museum, 1862-1917, compiled from the Official Records. Mimeographed copy in historical records of AFIP, pp. 8, 9.
