The Little Museum That Could Gross You Out
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.