Congress had already purchased the building of Mr. Ford, and used it for a time as the receptacle for the captured archives of the Confederate Government. Before it was opened as the Army Museum, its interior had been entirely remodeled, retaining nothing of the original building but the outside walls. It has been made fire-proof, and is exclusively devoted to the uses of the Museum. The third story is the Museum hall, lined on its four sides with pictures and glass cases filled with ghastly specimens, beside many more in the interior of the room.
Over a square railing, in the centre of the hall, you look down upon the second story, and through that to the first. The lower floor is filled with busy clerks, sitting at tables, writing out the medical and surgical histories of the war.
THE MAIN HALL OF THE ARMY MEDICAL MUSEUM.—WASHINGTON.
This Museum occupies the scene of the assassination of President Lincoln, in Ford’s Theatre, which after that date became the property of the Government. It contains a collection of upwards of twenty thousand rare, curious and interesting objects, surpassing any similar collection in the world. It is visited annually by upwards of twenty-five thousand persons.
The second floor, which is reached by light spiral stairs from the first, is largely devoted to the very valuable Medical and Surgical Library, which has been collected since the opening of the Museum. It now numbers thirty-eight thousand volumes, some of which are rare books of extreme value. One of these was among the earliest of printed volumes. The art of printing was first used to give to the world religious and medical books. This treasure of the Medical Museum was published at Venice, in 1480, and is the work of Petrus de Argelata. It is bound and illuminated in vellum. Another choice book, is a copy of Galen, which once belonged to the Dutch anatomist, Vierodt, and copiously annotated by him. These, and many other valuable books, have been bought by the agents of the Museum, abroad, while many others have been received as contributions from physicians, and scientific societies interested in the growth of this national institution.
Louis Bagger, in a late number of Appleton’s Journal, speaks of the Army Medical Museum as one of the most interesting, but least visited, of all the national institutions in Washington. It cannot fail to be one of the most absorbing spots on earth to the student of surgery or medicine; but to the unscientific mind, especially to one still aching with the memories of war, it must ever remain a museum of horrors. Its many bones, which never ached, and which have survived their painful sheaths of mortal flesh, all cool and clean, and rehung on golden threads, are not unpleasant to behold. But those faces in frames, eaten by cancer or lost in tumors, which you look up to as you enter, are horrible enough to haunt one forever (if you are not scientific) with the thought of what human flesh is heir to.
No! the Museum is a very interesting, but can never be a popular place to visit. I doubt if a sight at the Sioux pappoose, and a bit of John Wilkes Booth’s spinal marrow, or a piece of General Sickles’ leg, will be sufficient compensation to the average unscientific mind, to go twice to look at those terrible tumors and elephantiasis in gilt frames and glass jars. It is enough to make one feel as if the like were starting out all over you. But that’s because you are not scientific.
The first “specimen” which confronts you on entering is a withered human arm, with contracted hand and clinched fingers, mounted on wires in a glass case on the window-ledge. The sharp bone protrudes where it was shot off near the shoulder joint; every muscle is defined; the skin looks like tanned leather. It is not pleasant to look at. A thrilling story has been printed about this arm. I am sorry it is not wholly true. The one I have to tell will not please you as well, for it is not nearly as exciting.
We were told that the shock of the cannon-shot, which took off this arm, carried it up into a high tree, where, a year or two after, its owner, a Gettysburg hero, revisiting the battle-field, discovered his lost member lodged in the branches, brought it down and bore it hither as a trophy. The soldier did find his arm (I am telling the true story); but he found it in a corn-field. By what mark he knew it I am not informed, but he declared it to be his arm and brought it to the Museum as a first-class “sensational specimen.”
In the next window we find another one—the Sioux baby. Poor little baby! It is not a Modoc—though not much better—it did not live to slay our brethren, so we are sorry as we look at it—for its once black locks are bleached red, and its nose is gone. It was found in a tree near Fort Laramie. I have seen Sioux babies alive upon their native soil, and can testify from personal observation that this little pappoose-mummy is extraordinarily well dressed. Hannah of old did not sew more buttons on the coat of her little Samuel in the Temple, than this poor savage mother did on the plains of Wyoming. It is of blue flannel, profusely ornamented with round tin buttons, and many beads on its broad collar. On its neck it wears a string of white delf beads, and there is something cunning and dainty in the tiny embroidered moccasins upon its feet. In a case there is another pappoose still less agreeable to contemplate. It is a little Flat-head Indian. Its head is so very flat no doubt it died in the process of compression. This melancholy child also wears a white necklace, and was found buried in a tree.