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The Saturday Morning Post
Written by Morgan Hargrave
It is usually not a good sign when a museum’s first display details how popular it used to be. It seems the National Museum of Health and Medicine is decades removed from its glory days, when it was called the Army Medical Museum and resided in a series of more prestigious locations around D.C. It attracted between 450,000 and 765,000 visitors per year during the 1960s before being moved away from the Mall to make room for the Hirshhorn in 1968. Now it occupies a much smaller space on the Walter Reed campus in Takoma, and what remains is a strange little museum indeed.
The NMHM is nothing if not consistently gruesome. Images of combat wounds and amputated limbs abound, though much of the museum is not focused on the battlefield. A large section is dedicated to topics explored by the museum’s researchers, including a particularly unpleasant portion on skin diseases. Also on display is a megacolon that someone saw fit to pull out of an unfortunate young man and present for public viewing. Beyond this unsettling subject matter, the museum also suffers from a seemingly haphazard layout. A museum this small should not have any problem presenting its exhibits with at least some semblance of flow or chronology, yet the NMHM is fairly cumbersome.
The museum does succeed, though, when it concentrates on medicine in the midst of war. Made up of over 100 photographs, Battlefield Surgery 101: From the Civil War to Vietnam chronicles the heroic efforts of medics in the field. The wealth of images on display is enough to dispel any doubt that the medical staffs of our armed forces are anything less than superhuman. The exhibit articulates the stress and chaos of working in wartime conditions, chronicling the work of medics, nurses, and surgeons from the field to the operating room through a collection of over 100 photographs. While no less grotesque than the rest of the museum, the section is at least a bit more organized and significantly more interesting.
High art Battlefield is not -- there is more Stonewall Jackson here than Jackson Pollack. When you see a photograph of a man wearing an expression of extreme pain, it is not because he is struggling with some existential anguish over the existence of truth or meaning; it’s because he has a gaping hole in his leg. This short exhibit is valuable, then, because it gives us a glimpse into the work of men and women who strive to end pain in the most extreme conditions that man has ever created.
With all of the great museum options in D.C., it’s reasonable to assume that you may not have a trip to Takoma and the National Museum of Health and Medicine at the top of your list. Then again, it could be a strangely informative experience (who knew you could get tuberculosis of the skin?) and it is not so large as to require a whole day to cover everything the museum has to offer. In the end, at least one thing is certain: just don’t go right after lunch.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and is located at 6900 Georgia Ave., NW. Visitors to the museum must present a photo ID and enter at the gate located on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Elder Street.
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The Army Medical Museum was located where the Air and Space Museum is today. They had an excellent collection of diseased genitals that probably spurred the urban legend of John Dillinger's pickeled penis. The current exhibit is a mere wisp of what it once was. Seems that tourists want their freakshows on Fox, not in dusty old museums. Hot tip: if your spouse's biological clock is ringing off the hook, treat them to a tour of Philly's Mutter Museum. The ectopic pregnancy exhibit always puts me in the mood for cheesesteaks.
Jackson Pollack sux. The search for existential truth and meaning IS a gaping hole in your leg.
i take issue with your implication that for pain to legitimately appear in art it must be of the existential rather than physical variety. the question of what constitutes art is a tough one, but i don't think it has anything to do with this distinction.
I haven't been in ages, but my favorites at the AMM were the cyclops baby and the hairball extracted from the girl's stomach who had a hair-eating obsessive/compulsive issue. The Mutter museum in Philly is ok, but some of their models were wax and not the real thing.
Bob Flanagan agrees.
The Mutter museum is fantastic!
The hairs on the edges of the brain sections always make me queasy.
I really like this museum. It has a lot of totally bizarro exhibits, but like Morgan said, there isn't much organization. It's more like "hey, look at all this weird stuff we collected."
The disorganized state of the Army Medical Museum is an example of vicious circle funding: hardly anybody visits the place because it's so out of the way, and they don't give the museum much funding because hardly anybody visits. What they need to bring the crowds in is a decent traveling "theme" exhibit, like, say "Kids Swallow the Darndest Things!" or "Deep Inside Truman Capote's Rectum."
I envision fog machines, lasers, and LOTS of Henry Mancini.
I used to go to the Medical Museum often when I was a child. I adored the giant leg from the soldier that died of Elephantitis. I keep meaning to go but it is very difficult to get up to Silver Spring and then get through all the security hassles at Walter Reed. They should move the museum back to the Mall.
The problem with moving the museum back to the Mall is that you'd have people with hydrocephaly complaining that the exhibits belittle their condition.
I'd be much more inclined to visit a medical museum on the mall than some nondescript marble memorial for veterans with disabilities, although I'm inclined to think the vets think the exact opposite.
I'm sorry, but until you've gone to the Museum of Menstruation, you ain't seen nothing. Creepy Guy Runs Menstruation Museum Out of Basement just beats everything else one could pay $5 to see.