The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology: Its First Century 1862-1962.

On 21 May 1962, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology entered upon the second century of its life. It had started one hundred years before as an item in Circular No. 2, of the Surgeon Generals Office, in which Brig. Gen. William Alexander Hammond, The Surgeon General, announced his intention to establish an Army Medical Museum, for which medical officers were directed to collect specimens of morbid anatomy. The collections with which the Museum started consisted of three dried and varnished bones resting on a little shelf above the inkstand on the desk of Brigade Surgeon John Hill Brinton, the young medical officer who was to become the first curator of the Museum which was to be established. The Museum thus launched evolved into the Army Institute of Pathology which became the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-a veritable treasure house of medical knowledge and an active center for consultation, research, and education in the effects of disease and injury upon the form and function of living cells and tissue.