DC -- Natl Museum of Health and Medicine (Walter Reed):
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I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- NMHM_100619_006.JPG: Visibly Human:
Skeleton of Spanish American War Veteran Showing Evidence of Severe Arthritis:
Peter Cluckey was born on Sept. 16, 1882 in Lansing, Michigan and enlisted in the US Army when he was 17 years old, just after the Spanish-American War. He retired from the Army after just three years, but rejoined in 1904.
Two months after his second enlistment, Cluckey experienced joint pain and stiffness after a horseback-mounted drill held in a cold rain. He endured several medical examinations and was diagnosed with "rheumatism chronic, articular, affecting both hips, knees and ankle joints, and the right elbow."
He was treated at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Arkansas with sodium salicylate (an analgesic), potassium iodide, hydrotherapy and other methods, but discharged from the institution and the US Army in 1905 with a Certificate of Disability.
Despite a variety of treatments over the next 20 years, his condition worsened to the point where every joint in his body became fused together. Cluckey was moved into a sitting position so he could be placed in a chair or on his side in bed to sleep. Four front teeth were removed in 1921 so that he could be fed soft foods. He lived out the last 15 years of his life at the United States Soldiers Home in Washington DC.
Cluckey died on Sept. 10, 1925 at the age of 43. He was so impressed with the significance of his disease and the inability of the medical doctors of the time to comprehend the disease and cope with it, that he gave his body to the Army Medical Museum (the progenitor of today's National Museum of Health and Medicine) for study. Doctors determined during the autopsy that Cluckey had suffered from chronic progressive ankylosis rheumatoid arthritis and spondylitis severe enough to render him completely helpless.
The skeleton, which had been on display in a wooden chair since Cluckey's death, features most of its original bones. However, several bones tinted yellow (see the specimen or these images) are replacements from another skeleton for the original diseased bones which were removed after death.
- NMHM_100619_025.JPG: Megacolon:
An abnormally enlarged colon may be a congenital or an acquired trait. Congenital megacolon is due to a functional loss of the nerves in a segment of the colon. Damage to the nerves that normally help pass undigested matter through the intestine results in obstruction and enlargement of the colon. Acquired megacolon may be associated with chronic constipation, leading to a marked enlargement caused by obstruction. This megacolon was removed from a 19-year-old man with a history of constipation.
- NMHM_100619_076.JPG: On April 19, 2004, GB "Garry" Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip featured a badly wounded Lieutenant BD fading in and out of consciousness. Two days later, Trudeau revealed that BD had lost his leg in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. BD is one of the original characters in the strip, an ex-football jock turned college coach. He served in the National Guard in the first Gulf war and returned to Iraq in 2003. The strips attracted media attention, and Trudeau made several statements about why he injured his long-time character. In an interview with ABC News' program This Week and reprinted on the Doonesbury website, Trudeau said:
"What I mean to convey is that BD's life has been irrevocably changed -- that another chapter has begun. He's now on an arduous journey of recovery and rehabilitation. What I'm hoping to describe are the coping strategies that get people through this. There is no culture of complaint among the wounded. Most feel grateful to be alive and respectful of those who have endured even worse fates. But for many, a kind of black humor is indispensable in fending off bitterness and despair, so that's what will animate the strips that follow. I have to approach this with humility and care. I'm sure I won't always get it right, and people will let me know when I don't. But it seems worth doing. This month alone, we've sustained nearly 600 wounded in action. Whether you think we should be in Iraq or not, we can't tune it out. We have to remain mindful of the terrible losses that individual soldiers are suffering in our name."
BD was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany for additional care and has recently been transferred to Walter Reed Hospital. In the Sunday, June 13 strip, BD began examining catalogues for prosthetic legs and will be making the same adjustment that many soldiers here on base are having to make in real life. Hopefully, Trudeau's strips will convey to his large audience some of the difficulties that these soldiers will face.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine, AFIP is grateful to Mr. Trudeau for his donation of these two original comic strips.
- NMHM_100619_095.JPG: A good chunk of the museum had already been closed off, in preparation of being moved to the new (smaller) Seminary Place location.
- NMHM_100619_108.JPG: The objects in the closed off area are being crated up
- NMHM_100619_123.JPG: Elephantiasis of the scrotum:
The parasitic roundworm, Onchocerca volvulus, transmitted by black flies of the genus Simulium, can live in human skin, connective tissue and the lymphatic system. The worm can block the lymphatic vessels affecting the body's normal ability to drain excess extracellular fluid from the tissues. Elephantiasis is the result of a combination of inflammation, scar tissue and overall enlargement of surrounding tissues in response to the parasite. The patient from which this specimen originated underwent surgery in 1968. He recovered without complication. At the time of the surgery the specimen weighed 40 pounds.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].