Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/242



Chronic difficulties of too little space and too small a staff continued to plague the operation of the Army Medical Museum in the years between the 1918 armistice and Hitler's invasion of Poland, 21 years later.

"The rapid accumulation of materials * * * burdened the museum staff with the labor of preparation" of specimens for several years after the First World War, said Maj. Virgil H. Cornell, addressing the International Association of Medical Museums at its meeting in Washington in May 1933. The combination of the volume of materials for display and the shortage of space had tended to bring about overcrowding of the exhibits, particularly since, "anticipation of the early erection of a new museum had led to the postponement of rearrangement" of materials in the existing building. By 1933, it had become apparent that the new building for which a site had been purchased 11 years earlier was, like many another hopeful project, a victim of the great depression. "In view of a rather indefinite postponement of any new construction," Major Cornell added, "we are attempting to improve the material accumulated with what facilities are at hand. Though no progress has yet been made in the new grouping of exhibits, it is none too early to begin the assembling of materials so that it may be ready for transfer in group arrangement to the new museum when that time comes." The time when such a transfer and rearrangement was to be made was not to come about until after two wars, three temporary homes, and four removals of the Museum, so that it is no wonder that the idea of making ready in 1933 for an anticipated move to a new building might, in Major Cornell's words, "sound overoptimistic." But, he added, in extenuation of his seeming overoptimism, "we have lived too long in an atmosphere of pessimism, so it is time to reverse the trend." 1 In the discussion which followed Major Cornell's presentation of the current activities of the Museum, Dr. Howard T. Karsner of Cleveland, professor of