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WASHINGTON: The spinal cord of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth — still bearing the bullet that killed him — is sharing eternity in a drawer in Washington with President Dwight Eisenhower’s gallstones.
Across the room in a cabinet is the skeleton of Able, the first monkey in space. And tucked into a drawer beside Able are the remains of 19th-century US settlers who made the long trek West in search of a better life and died there.
Like a closet full of family treasures gathered over 140 years, the US National Museum of Health and Medicine is crammed full of dusty mementos. But unlike the bits and pieces in granny’s closet the museum’s heirlooms are flesh and bones.
A piece of Abraham Lincoln’s skull and a lock of his hair, the leg Civil War Gen. Daniel Sickles lost at the battle of Gettysburg and lesser known body parts, the blackened lung of a coal miner, a massive scrotum swollen with elephantiasis, and an eggplant-sized hairball removed from a girl’s stomach, help tell the story of the nation’s health for better or worse.
“We allow people to learn about topics that have been removed from society. You’re confronting death, disease and body parts that a lot of people have questions about but there are not a lot of places where you can get answers,” said Paul Sledzik, curator of the museum’s anatomical collections.
Not surprisingly school groups love the place for its “yuck” factor. But since its inception in the mid-19th century, researchers have mined the collection for scientific and historical gold.
“We actually get relatives of Civil War soldiers who come, people writing histories of battles to see the leg of a guy they’ve been writing about,” Sledzik said.
“I’ve had people looking at trauma healing, people looking at growth and development, and people working on seat-belts.”
SURGEON GENERAL: The collection began as the Army Medical Museum in 1862 when Civil War-era Surgeon General William Hammond told battlefield doctors to collect specimens from among the thousands of injured and dead soldiers littering the mid-Atlantic countryside.
Hammond and the museum’s first curator, John Brinton, thought they could learn something from the soldiers about the diseases that were killing them even faster than the bullets. They also wanted to examine gunshot wounds and amputations, so doctors could learn to improve treatment of soldiers for future wars.
Their research became the basis for the definitive six-volume Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. It also spawned a museum that includes up to 3 million items and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, of which the museum is a part and which today is gathering DNA samples from US soldiers in much the way Civil War doctors gathered data on troops in their day.
“The focus in the Civil War time was the interpretation of disease and injury. The only way they could study was to have the gross specimen in front of them. Today it’s on the molecular level, the microscopic level,” Sledzik said.
Chris Kelly, director of public affairs at the Armed Forces Institute, said the DNA work is a 21st-century extension of the concept that started in 1862. “Today we have the best DNA lab in the world,” he said.
In 1881 and 1882, the staff performed autopsies on assassinated President James Garfield and his murderer, Charles Guiteau. Its fifth curator, Maj. Walter Reed, discovered the cause of yellow fever, and its scientists contributed to research on diseases from typhoid fever to syphilis.—Reuters
