Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/206



"At no time during the war was there a sufficient number of trained pathologists in the service," said Surgeon General Merritte W. Ireland in his annual report for the fiscal year ending 30 June 1919. "The same condition seems to exist in civil life," he added, "for it proved impossible to find a sufficient number of trained men."

A start toward correction of this situation was made when the position of the chief of the laboratory service in Army hospitals was made "coordinate in standing and authority with the chiefs of the medical and surgical services," thereby opening the previously blocked path to promotion for practitioners of pathology. During the year, also, special arrangements were made for the instruction of medical officers in pathology at the Government Hospital for the Insane (St. Elizabeths), in Washington, D.C., at the Brady laboratories of the hospital in New Haven, Conn., and at the Army Medical Museum, where special instruction in neuropathology was given. "Pathology, however," as The Surgeon General said in his report, "is a subject in which a large experience is acquired slowly, and, in spite of efforts to train additional men by the arrangement of special courses of instruction, the number of qualified pathologists could not be greatly increased during the war." 1

Meeting the need for more and better-trained pathologists became, in the period following the First World War, a prime purpose of the Museum. Col. Charles F. Craig, the first postwar Curator (fig. 61), was not primarily a pathologist but was distinguished for his studies of dengue fever, filariasis, the dysenteries, and, most particularly, malaria and its control. The incidence of the last-named disease in the Army was reduced in the first quarter of the 20th century from more than 700 to less than 10 per 1,000. This control of malaria in the Army was not the result of any one man's efforts, but Colonel Craig's contribution, through his "extensive investigations, writings, and advice" on the subject, was outstanding. He was chosen by a board of officers appointed by Surgeon