materials, it was hoped that the students might receive more thorough instruction in tropical medicine, and that future medical officers of the Armed Forces would have more adequate training in the subject. 19[1]
So great was the demand for pathological materials, and so valuable was the concentration of such materials at a central point, that the flow of specimens and records from military sources was supplemented by contributions from the civilian medical world. Action to this end was started at a meeting of a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee of the National Research Council, held in the same month as Pearl Harbor, at the suggestion of Col. George R. Callender, and was carried forward by the Council of the International Association of Medical Museums, and the secretaries of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists and of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists. These organizations approved a plan for the collection of pathological material, including pictorial records of diseases and injuries, that might come to the attention of civilian pathologists so that it might be added to the collections of the armed forces. The civilian materials to which attention was particularly called were those "arising from airplane crashes, civilian bombings, fires, gunshot wounds, and specific epidemics, particularly the virus diseases, encephalitis, polio, Rickettsia, influenza and 'atypical' pneumonia." The Army Medical Museum was approved as the collecting point for all such material, which could there be "processed, correlated and studied with material from army activities and possibly from the other armed services" and be "available for training, teaching and scientific purposes."
Pursuant to this plan, Colonel Ash, in his capacity as secretary of the Association of Medical Museums, on 5 March 1942, issued a circular addressed to civilian doctors, in which he outlined the plan and specified in greater detail the types of materials desired. 20 [2]
This appeal was reinforced by Surgeon General's Office Circular Letter No. 127 (1943), which read:
In view of the need for pathologic material in undergraduate and graduate education, the Committee on Pathology of the National Research Council urges that all who have suitable anatomic specimens forward them to the Curator of the Army Medical Museum * * * for correlation and distribution to other central agencies and to teaching institutions. Material from the following is particularly wanted: the malarial diseases, bacillary dysentery, endamebiasis, filariasis, the trypanosomiases, the relapsing levers, the
- ↑ 19 (1) Circular Letter to Professors of Pathology, undated. (2) Letter, Col. J. E. Ash to The Surgeon General, 30 June 1943, with 1st Indorsement, The Surgeon General, to Colonel Ash, 1 July 1943. (3) Report of Army Medical Museum Activities to 31 December 1943. On file in historical records of AFIP.
- ↑ 20 Correspondence on file in historical records of AFIP.
