Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/183

THE MUSEUM IN A WORLD AT WAR One of the nonmedical members of the staff, detailed to Camp Wheeler, Ga., during the period of the dread epidemic of influenza in 1918, "secured through the cooperation of the pathologist at the camp hospital, most of the really good specimens of influenza lungs that were in the Museum." This man, wrote Dr. Ewing, "was permitted to remove the organs from the body and preserve them before random incisions were made. He worked over them day and night until fixation was perfect, packed them himself, rode on the wagon that carried them to the station, and saw them off on the train." With the help of such devoted members of the staff, the Museum's pathology department was, in the opinion of the eminent Dr. Ewing, "in fair working order" by the date of the armistice, with "a constant flow of materials of all grades arriving." 15

To take charge of the business of classifying and cataloging these accessions to the Museum, Maj. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, a retired medical officer who had served briefly on the staff of the Museum in the early i88o's while it was still housed in the Ford's Theater building, was recalled to active duty in January 1918. The major was a most prolific writer on a variety of subjects, and accordingly was charged with the additional "duty of publishing in medical and other journals of good standing articles describing those activities in the museum about which the medical profession at large and the general public may properly be informed." 16

He took up his task of publicizing the problems and the accomplishments of the Museum with enthusiasm as to the future but with a critical view and a caustic pen in reference to the past. He had made known his views as to the state of the institution in an article published in October 1917, in which he declared that "from the standpoint of antiquity and history, this collection will always be of enormous value, but from the viewpoint of a growing collection and up-to-date exposition of modern medicine in all its varied departments, it has, for only too long a time, been a supreme joke." 17

This opinion of the Museum, as it existed before 1917, expressed before Major Shufeldt's recall to active duty, was repeated in varied language in the articles published by him while engaged in the work of classifying and cataloging its incoming accessions. The pre-1917 museum, he wrote, "was still a