Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/124

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING from about 1870 to the end of 1895, about the truth of the charges. Dr. McConnell replied on 8 June 1896, "That a very wonderfully distorted, inaccurate and false description has been given of work conducted at the Army Medical Museum some twenty years ago." He continued : Those who were practically engaged in the Microscopical Division should know better than anyone else the character of the work that was performed, and that all animals experimented upon were under the influence of an anesthetic. One who was not in any manner connected with the Microscopical Division of the Museum, as was the case with Dr. L. E. Rauterberg, could draw upon his imagination very satisfactorily, and write a vivid description of what might have been done with animals, the remains of which he saw under alcohol in specimen jars. I, however, testify that at no time during my connection with the Army Medical Museum, from about 1870 to the end of the year 1895, have any experiments been performed upon animals in which an anesthetic was not used, unless some of the ordinary inoculation experiments, which are practically painless, nor were animals kept in a mutilated condition. 20 Dr. Reed did not appear before the Senate Committee, that function being performed for the Army by General Sternberg, who vigorously opposed passage of the bill which, in the opinion of most doctors, would have so restricted animal experimentation as to have the practical effect of prohibiting the use of this avenue to increased medical knowledge. Dr. Reed did, however, appear in opposition to the bill at a preliminary hearing before the commissioners of the District of Columbia, as is mentioned in an account in die Washington Post of 10 February, and reproduced in the transcript of the Senate Committee hearings.

The major military event of the nineties, the war with Spain, seemed at first to have passed the Museum by. Col. Dallas Bache, who had been appointed Director of the Museum and Library Division on 31 January 1898, as the war clouds were thickening, made a report to Surgeon General Sternberg on 17 October, after the brief war had been fought and won, in which he said:

The contributions to this Museum from the active theatre of the recent war with Spain and from the extensive field of subsidiary operations, have been so few and unimportant that it seems desirable to renew the attention of Medical Officers to this important subject. The hurry and peculiar military conditions of the Santiago campaign, and the amount of work imposed upon Medical Officers in our large camps of instruction would naturally obscure the more remote interests of the Museum; but from our large General Hospitals and Hospital Ships, and the more deliberate methods of our forces of occupation may well be demanded a return to the systematic collection of specimens illustrating the