Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/102

BROADENING THE BASE terior of the building raises a question as to how much ornamentation would have been required in the 1880's and the 1890's to cause a building to be considered elaborate. The structure, according to the proposed guidebook, consisted of a center building 112 by 55 feet, with wings 60 by 131 feet on either end. Thus the building had a front of 232 feet on B Street, with wings jutting back 81 feet beyond the rear line of the center building. In the courtyard thus formed, there was an annex 52 by 24 feet, connected with the rear of the center building by a covered passageway. The central and western portions of the first floor were largely occupied by the clerks of the Record and Pension Division, while the east wing was given over to appanages of the Museum — a dissecting room, an anatomist's room, a darkroom, a room containing the outfit for a post hospital, and a room for genitourinary specimens considered unsuited for display in a museum open to all comers.

The east wing on the second floor was given over to the specimens of the Museum, the west wing to shelf stacks of the Library, while the central portion of the floor was occupied by library offices and reading rooms. The Library and the Museum wings were built so as to form fireproof compartments separated from the other parts of the building. Both were open from the second story to the roof, forming halls 31 feet high to the eaves and 47 feet to the ridge of the lantern skylights by which they were ventilated and lighted. The Museum wing also had, on the level of the third floor, a gallery 14 feet wide, extending clear around the hall.

Rooms on the third floor were used as offices, a microscopy room, and a room equipped for anthropometry. The fourth floor, found in the central building only, contained the photographic gallery and several storerooms, two of which were filled with appliances, for transporting the sick and wounded in the field, for which no space could be found in the exhibit hall of the Museum. The anatomical and biological laboratory was contained in the annex, in which were found also the utilities and the limited and somewhat primitive sanitary facilities. 20