Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/83

SECOND WIND pieces" relating to the diseases of women and children — which, after all, were not foreign to the practice of medicine by army doctors responsible for the health of dependents as well as for that of military personnel.

Many of the post-war contributions to the Museum were from physicians and surgeons in civil life who, as the institution became better known after the war, gave specimens developed in their practice — the beginning of the close relationship between the Museum and its successor, the Institute, and the medical profession, the results of which have been so fruitful.20

Among the more interesting of the early contributors to the collections were former Confederate surgeons, including three presidents of the American Medical Association, Dr. Henry F. Campbell of Augusta, Ga., Dr. Paul F. Eve of Nashville, Tenn., and Dr. Hunter McGuire of Richmond, professor of surgery in the Medical College of Virginia, but perhaps better known as the chief surgeon of "Stonewall" Jackson's Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. 21

The collections of the Museum, housed on the third floor of the building, were lighted by windows front and rear and by a large central skylight. Beneath the skylight was an oblong opening in the floor which let the light fall into the space below. All available wall space was covered with display cases, which also stood in ranks on the floor. In these cases, which were of pine and painted white, the specimens were exhibited. Most of the surgical specimens were mounted "dry," while almost all the medical specimens were "wet" preparations, preserved in wide-mouthed jars, closed with ground glass stoppers to the undersurfaces of which were attached glass hooks from which the specimens were suspended in the preservative fluid (fig. 28).22

While supplies of alcohol distilled from confiscated whisky remained ample, at least until 1876, with the growth of the Museum and its work, the annual appropriation of $5,000 — which had seemed ample to Dr. Otis in 1865 — ceased