This summer I interned at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. The museum, originally called the Army Medical Museum, was founded “to study and improve medical conditions during the American Civil War.” The museum’s collection includes archival materials, anatomical and pathological specimens, medical instruments and artifacts, and microscope slide-based medical research collections. The museum is officially divided into 5 collections: the anatomical collection, neuroanatomical collection, historical collection, the Human Developmental Anatomy Center (HDAC), and the Otis Historical Archives. Although the largest portion of my internship was spent within the anatomical collection, I was assigned duties in the neuroanatomical collection, the HDAC, and the Otis archives.
Because of my interest in craniometrics (metric analysis of the size and shape of crania), the staff coordinated a project in which I would be databasing original written communications regarding the museum’s role in the history of craniology. The project completed with the Otis Historical Archives was probably my favorite. Letters came from some of the biggest names in the history of anthropology such as Franz Boas, John Wesley Powell, and Jeffries Wyman; and pertained to topics such as craniology, the acquisition of skulls, and contemporary instruments and techniques. By reading and transcribing original correspondence, I gained valuable insight into the first usages of empiricism and the scientific method in anthropology. The letters hearken to an era in which evolutionary theory was taking hold and racial hierarchies were created to justify the subjugation of African slaves and indigenous American Indians. Anthropology textbooks are filled with accounts of the racialist origins of physical anthropology; however, the NMHM letters betrayed the essence of this thinking through original handwriting, lexicon, and style of letter writing.
My overall internship responsibilities included assisting in the organization and preservation of dry skeletonized and wet formalin fixed tissue specimens, aiding in the organization of the osteological collection by digitizing crania and running them through FORDISC 3.0 (Ousley and Jantz 2005), and performing archival research to enhance the collection’s research value and update relevant databases and files. My daily responsibility was the organization and preservation of collection specimens, while the digitizing and archival research were projects completed in succession. Each project lasted approximately one working week.
The NMHM osteological and anatomical collections are housed in storage containers in the collections area. The osteological collection is made up of several small collections. These skeletal specimens came from the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In addition to the human skeletal remains, there were numerous animal specimens. Most of the animal specimens were examples of pathologies; however, the museum has the skeleton of one of the original space chimpanzees. The fixed wet tissue specimens were housed in a room of their own because they were contained in formalin filled jars, and these chemicals are considered hazardous. The NMHM collections are accessed daily by museum employees as well as periodically by researchers from other museums and academic institutions. My duties required daily handling of skeletal material. After obtaining specimens for other researchers or for myself, I was required to close the cabinets housing the specimens once they were removed. Closing the cabinets protects the specimens from mechanical damage from passers-by as well as from damage due to insects.
I aided in the organization of the osteological collection by digitizing crania and running them through FORDISC 3.0 (Ousley and Jantz 2005) to get a better understanding of their ancestry. FORDISC is discriminant function analysis software developed by Steve Ousley and Richard Jantz to aid forensic anthropologists in the determination of ancestry and sex of unknown skeletal specimens. Many of the specimens at the museum were obtained in the infancy of osteological collection, when recording standards were not what they are today. The crania that I ran through FORDISC mainly came from a cabinet marked “Peruvian Crania.” Although it was known that some of the crania housed in the cabinet were not Peruvian, the majority were collected from Peru. The FORDISC analysis helped to confirm which were Peruvian and provided additional data on the ones who were not by using statistical analysis to classify each cranium into its ancestral group. For example, one specimen was assigned to the Austrian reference population in FORDISC. I investigated the accession number of the specimen in the collection’s archival files found out that the individual was a white soldier that died during the Mexican-American War.
While I was interning, the museum was undergoing the process of digitizing all of their microscope slides. Once the slides had been digitized, the images on the computer had to be properly named. While the task only involved putting a name on a picture, making sure that it was the correct name required reading a description of the image. As I renamed the slide images, I was able to learn about bone disease at the microscopic level and what normal and pathological bone growth looks like histologically. Diseases such as rickets, scurvy, and osteomyelitis leave their imprint on bone microstructure. After learning how normal cortical and trabecular appear microscopically, I was able to detect the signature markings of each of these diseases.
I cannot overemphasize the extent to which my experiences at the National Museum of Health and Medicine have advanced my knowledge and understanding of anthropology. At the museum I examined first-hand accounts from many important periods in anthropological history. I got to see the handwriting of famous anthropologists whom I have studied in the classroom and in textbooks. As the reincarnation of the Army Medical Museum, the NMHM is an institution important to the formation of American anthropology. Every day that I worked at the museum, I was shown considerable one-on-one time with the collections staff. Each member was genuinely concerned with the development of my anthropological career, and I can never show them enough gratitude for their mentorship. I encourage any and every student interested to seek out an internship at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.