Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/246

BETWEEN THE WARS Curtis, and carried on by Dr. William M. Gray, had been done, Major Dart noted, "entirely after office hours and on Sundays and holidays," since routine official duties had "occupied his entire government time."

The Department of Histology, except for the loss of personnel, had "maintained its former status," largely because of the publications and contacts of Mrs. Helenor Wilder and the training which she had given the other members of this unit.

Comparing the period of 1924-26 with 1932-34, and taking the average number of accessions as a fair index of the volume of work accomplished, the special report found that the average had been 2,666 per year in the later period as against 1,990 per year for the earlier. The difference was widened by the fact that approximately 1,200 per year of the earlier accessions were not new cases but simply re-accessions from the old museum, requiring only the paperwork of entering them in the modern system of classification, while in the later period, lack of personnel had precluded the work of re-accessioning, so that the accession figures represented new cases, the majority of which were specimens sent in for diagnosis. The actual work in the 1930's was nearly double that in the period in the 1920's, while the personnel had been reduced from 31 to 21 in all categories. Major Dart continued:

This is an insufficient number to carry on more than the routine and consequently the work on large projects essential to the orderly classification of the museum which have been started in previous years from time to time have been stopped and a large part of the vast museum collection still remains in a hopeless muddle. The very building has degenerated into a shambles of cobwebs and dirt, filled with antique furniture and the debris of worn out equipment and broken exhibits.

The state of affairs in the Museum proper, characterized as a "breakdown," imposed such a handicap upon the work of the Curator and his professional assistants that they were able to accomplish the routine pathology only with difficulty and had "little time" for the "scientific research with which the officers on duty at the museum are charged by regulation." Major Dart's views on the state of the Museum were shared in large degree by his successor, Capt. Hugh Richmond Gilmore, Jr. (fig. 74) » who served as Acting Curator for a few months in 1935 and 1936. In a memorandum of 5 August 1936, for The Surgeon General, Captain Gilmore made the point that between 1926 and 1936 the volume of work in the institution had increased