Army Wrair

National Museum of Health and Medicine: Patience and Preservation

To understand the history of a thing is to understand its nature. In the case of the items on display and warehoused at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, this goes two-fold. NMHM painstakingly preserves everything, to not only study the nature of the specimens, but to also preserve them for future study. From pieces of President Lincoln’s skull and World War I and II surgery kits, to Vietnam uniforms and remnants of makeshift hospitals from Iraq and Afghanistan, the NMHM encompasses the innovations, and even some of the failures of military medicine throughout its history.

As a patron of the NMHM, you are treated to a well-organized gallery and a touring staff with extreme knowledge of the eras and items represented in the museum. It’s not long before the curators’ approach to their enormous cache of historical items becomes clear. They are dedicated to the preservation of the specimens above all else. In the case of Lincoln’s skull, they show great restraint in not destroying the pieces to get at information that may be gleaned by doing so. The tour guide informed the group that there would be much to learn by breaking down the pieces for various chemical and spectral analyses but it would utterly destroy the pieces themselves. Americans can be grateful that, throughout the history of the museum, radical acts of instant gratification have not been employed. Though the museum has passed through many hands since the institution if its original curator, John Brinton, common sense and the forward thinking notion that, one day, technology would unlock these mysteries without the destruction of the specimens, has reigned supreme.

One such example of this dedication to preservation, other than the restraint to not dissolve President Lincoln’s skull in one sort of acid or another, is in the case of the Japanese bone fixation tools from World War II. These tools are remarkable...