Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/284

270 Accordingly, the "first and most important recommendation" of the Committee was that the name of the Museum be changed to the Institute of Pathology _ a change already in effect unofficially which, 6 months later, was to be made official by appropriate Army regulation. The second recommendation, that the Institute should become the central laboratory of pathology for the Veterans' Administration, was likewise already underway and was to be consummated in a matter of months.

A third recommendation for a new departure concerned itself with the need of a new building. The building in which somehow the work of the war years had been done, the Committee said, "was built in 1887, fifty-eight years ago, and is no longer adequate * * * It is antiquated, overcrowded, obviously cannot be modernized, and there is no provision for experimental research." The Committee recommended, therefore, that "the Surgeon General proceed at once to secure authorization and funds for the construction of a building adequate in size and arrangement for the expanding activities of a modern army institute of pathology."

In this recommendation also, the Committee was putting its weight behind an activity that was already underway— the effort to obtain a new building for the Library and the Museum. This effort, which had been shelved in December 1941, in the face of the oncoming storm of war, had been revived in the planning stage before the war ended. On 14 December 1944, Col. James E. Ash advised The Surgeon General of the Army that it had just come to his attention that "entirely new plans for the building had been prepared," dated September 1944, but that no opportunity had been afforded the Museum to "express our ideas on plans for the Army Medical Museum portion of the building," and that the new plans had "omitted two of the floors that had originally been assigned to the Museum."

"We fully recognize the great importance of the Army Medical Library," he said, "but we do not hesitate to state that the Army Medical Museum, as it has developed over the past twenty years, has reached a point of equal importance, not only to the Medical Department of the Army but to the medical profession in general * * *. The enormous expansion of the pathologic and illustrative functions has justified our new designation as the Army Institute of Pathology as more exactly representing our real purpose * * *. The Institute is acknowledged as the largest center of pathological and medical illustra-