Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/197

THE MUSEUM IN A WORLD AT WAR attempt to add to the medical knowledge of officers and men through anatomically accurate medical art helped to make the army of 1917-18 the first in United States history in which deaths from disease were fewer than those from battle-field casualties (fig. 60).

A separately organized branch of medical art in the Instruction Laboratory dealt with making casts and wax models of the lesions of wounds and disease. Capt. James Frank Wallis, a Washington dermatologist and an experienced modeler in wax, was in charge of the work and was assisted by Miss Eleanor Courtenay Allen of Milwaukee, who had studied at the Chicago Art Institute, and who joined the Museum staff in March 1918. 39

The Museum had had for many years a collection of several hundred wax models, for the most part produced by the famous Baretta studios in Pans, and part of the work of the new division was to rehabilitate some of the French models which had deteriorated from prolonged exposure to direct sunlight.

With all the new developments and extensions of the service of the Museum in the United States, the goal of the organization was to be of service overseas, whether in pathology, photography, or anatomical art. First steps to that end were taken in January 1918, when The Surgeon General at home sought from the Chief Surgeon overseas authorization to send over a medical museum unit.40

The oversea work of the Museum was to be in charge of Maj. (afterward Col.) Louis B. Wilson, in civil life pathologist and director of laboratories for the Mayo medical organization at Rochester, Minn. Dr. Wilson was ordered to England— first to study what was being done along the line of collecting specimens in the British and Colonial Forces, and then to France for duty with the AEF as an assistant director of the Division of Laboratories. In England, where he spent the last 3 weeks of April, Major Wilson conferred with Sir Walter Morley Fletcher, secretary of the National Research Committee; Prof. Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons; and Lt. Col. J. C. Adami, in charge of the historical bureau of the Canadian Medical Corps, with reference to methods of collecting pathological specimens. He talked also with officers in charge of military orthopedics, concerning casts, models, paintings, and drawings; with officers in charge of the cinema service; an with those in charge of the indexing and filing of medical records and their