Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/202

184 manding General, AEF, to The Adjutant General of the Army. Paragraph 2 of this message read:

Request that the Museum Unit, one Cinema Camerist, one photographer and four artists with complete equipment and adequate supplies for at least six months be sent to France. Item M 941 K. Consult Curator Army Medical Museum. 48

It was the end of August before the unit asked for could be assembled and dispatched overseas, but by the middle of September, two groups sent from the United States arrived in France. Captain Ross and seven photographers reported to the headquarters of the Division of Laboratories, then at Dijon, and Lieutenant Schwarz, Lt. W. H. French, and Miss Allen, illustrators and modelers, who had come over attached to Base Hospital No. 115, were sta- tioned at the hospital center in Vichy. 49

Before the General Staff, AEF, allowed Major Wilson to ask for talent from the United States, he had "managed to scrape up in the Base Hospitals some fifteen to twenty men who had had more or less training in medical illustration," as he wrote Colonel Owen, on 5 October 1918. "A few of these," he continued, "such as Coleman and Jarrett, of whom you wrote, are good Brödel-trained artists. Most of them have been landscape painters, interior decorators or white-wash brush artists. A few of them we will be able to train to do fairly good work. I propose to do this by ordering them to Vichy, where Schwarz, French and Miss Allen will be permanently stationed."

As to the photographic work, Major Wilson wrote Colonel Owen that "a number of units" had come to France with "fairly good amateur photographers" but that most of them, "having nothing to do, had been put into work entirely foreign to photography" and "had to be blasted loose by slow and diplomatic methods. Some are still grown fast to non-photographic jobs but we are slowly getting the work in operation."

Colonel Owen was intensely interested in the use of moving pictures for instruction purposes and doubtless had impressed his views upon Major Wilson. It must have been with some degree of disappointment, then, that the major reported, "up to date I have not been able to arouse any interest whatsoever in moving pictures in the Medical Department of the A.E.F. * * *. Most of the surgeons say they do not see any value in moving pictures of surgical operations except to advertise the operator and that they do not want them taken * * *. However, I am very far from disheartened, especially since