Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/213

196 64.—A 1920 photograph of the gross pathological laboratory of the Army Medical Museum.

being not only a place for the exhibition of pathological and other material, but a great instruction center in pathology and epidemiology."

This concept of the Museum as a connecting link between military and civil medicine, expressed by The Surgeon General in 1920, was not new. It was foreshadowed by Surgeon General William A. Hammond in the very beginning of the institution and had been repeated by other medical men, both military and civilian. It had been most eloquently voiced by Col. John Shaw Billings in his address to the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, meeting in Washington in 1888. Billings, in fact, had gone a step further when, in 1895, he entered into an arrangement under which the Museum became the repository of the dental and oral collections of the American Dental Association.