skulls and skeletons, with special attention paid to the anatomy of the horse.
The majority of the 6,000 surgical specimens were, as was to be expected, illustrative of military surgery, though other surgical cases were already well represented. Over 400 missiles extracted from wounds were included, while sabers and other cutting weapons were responsible for 22 specimens.
"Altogether," wrote Dr. Woodward, "it may safely be asserted that in the illustration of military surgery this section not only exceeds any other surgical museum in the United States, but surpasses any similar collection hitherto made in the Old World — a fact that has been frequently and willingly admitted by foreign savants well acquainted with the subject who have visited Washington." 18 [1]
Dr. Woodward doubtless referred to statements by Dr. Berenger-Feraud of Paris, published in the Gazette des hopitaux civils et militaires, Paris, and Saint George Mivart, published in Nature, London, in 1870. In the Paris publication, Dr. Berenger-Feraud said that the United States had done as much in the building of an anatomicopathological museum in 5 years as had been done in Europe in a century, and that the three catalogs which had been published — surgical, medical, and microscopical — contained more specimens than were in all the like museums in Europe combined. In recognition of the fact that the materials in the Museum had been chiefly collected during the American Civil War, Mr. Mivart said in the London publication that "the Americans are a wonderful people. There are few other nations which would have been capable of so utilizing the results of a protracted internecine war as to make them available in after years toward the advancement of medical science and alleviation of human pain." 19[2]
Some foreign visitors, according to Dr. Woodward, were not only impressed by the scope of the collections of the Museum, but "seem to have been particularly struck with the free access given to the general public and to private soldiers, who in less enlightened communities would be excluded from such an institution."
While the majority of the 1,150 specimens in the medical section of the Museum illustrated "morbid conditions of the internal organs in fever, chronic dysentery and other camp diseases," Dr. Woodward reported, "the number of preparations which exhibit the morbid anatomy of the diseases of civil life" had been constantly increasing since the war. These included "pathological
