2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Erin␣ H. McLeary University of Pennsylvania
HSS Abstracts
War Pathologies/the Pathology of War:
Museum Collecting in the First World War
For physicians and medical researchers involved in the treatment and prevention
of injury and disease during the Great War, trench diseases, mustard gas,
influenza, and above all, modern artillery posed new and painful types of
problems. This paper examines the response of one group of medical scientists,
those of the Museum Unit of the American Expeditionary Force. In the face of
a set of new and horrific pathologies, these scientists responded by employing
an old method derived from natural history practice: they collected. In total,
the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., received from the AEF
approximately 15,000 specimens illustrative of war-induced pathologies. Why
did these scientists apply the methods of the field sciences to the medical
problems posed by modern war? The collection of specimens illustrating the
injuries and diseases of war was not a new medical pastime. The Army Medical
Museum had been founded to serve as a repository for specimens from the
Civil War. But, by the time of World War I, as AEF Colonel Louis Wilson
noted, such collecting “would seem to have relatively little place in a military
expeditionary force.” Yet to a certain scientific and medical mindset, field
collecting seemed an inherently logical method of organizing and systematizing
new knowledge, and arranging specimens into exhibits seemed to provide a
natural means for diffusing that knowledge among researchers and medical
practitioners. The logic of the museum medium, however, was not always
apparent to military commanders. And precisely because these war specimens
were organized within a museum setting, they functioned as more than mere
examples of novel injuries. The collection and cataloguing of war specimens
was at once a source of therapeutic optimism to observers who noted the
stimulating effects of war upon progress in science and medicine, and a literal
embodiment of the horrors of a war fought with new types of killing
technologies. Collected on the battlefield and in base hospitals, the specimens
were “the true flowers of blood and pain.”
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Susan␣ A. Miller University of Pennsylvania
Health in the Balance:
Learning Lessons from the Landscape at Girls’ Summer Camps, 1910-1939
The 1926 edition of Porter Sargent’s Guide to Summer Camps, “an invaluable
resource for discriminating parents,” heartily endorsed the Girl Scout camping
program for its positive health benefits. The Scout program was “carefully
planned to teach good health and to develop character.” Scouting leadership
could not have agreed more. From their inception in 1912, the Girl Scouts—
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