Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/5



As the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology approached its centennial year in nineteen hundred and sixty-two, it seemed appropriate to pause for a brief recapitulation of its accomplishments during its first one hundred years. To this end, a fitting ceremony was held in November 1962 to mark this event. The program was further enhanced by a 2-day scientific program that not only summed up what had been accomplished in the past but attempted to glimpse the future of the study of disease.

In addition to holding these programs, it was considered that the completion of the first century of the Institute would also be an appropriate time to compile a more detailed study of the people and events that had made the Institute one of the Nation's leading scientific institutions from its very inception. With the approval of the Board of Governors, the Surgeons General of the Army. Navy, and Air Force, and with the assistance of the staff of the Institute, its Scientific Advisory Board, and the Institute's many devoted consultants, a project to compile a history was initiated. The assistance and support of The Historical Unit. U.S. Army Medical Service, and of The Surgeon General of the Army were requested, and they enthusiastically joined in the effort to assemble this record. The role of The Historical Unit in the compilation of this volume is but a continuation of the long and intimate association of this Unit and the Institute. One of the two original missions of the Army Medical Museum, the forerunner of this Institute, was to prepare the great "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion," the other being "to collect and to forward to the Office of the Surgeon General, all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable; together with projectile and foreign bodies removed, and such other matters as may prove of interest in the study of military medicine or surgery." This first effort of The Historical Unit, while it was still an integral part of the Army Medical Museum, moved Rudolf Virchow, the great German pathologist and the father of modern pathology, to comment, "From this time dates a new era in military science. Whoever reads these publications will be constantly astonished at the wealth of experience, the exactness of detail, the careful statistics and scholarly