Medicine: After the General’s Leg

Whatever else he did in his 88 flamboyant years, Daniel Edgar Sickles will be remembered for the way his troops were disposed on unprotected ground at the Battle of Gettysburg, and for the fact that he got shot. Civil War buffs still debate the merit of his deployment, but there is no question that the Confederate cannonball that smashed Sickles’ right leg helped to make U.S. medical history. After the leg was amputated, a Union medic showed Sickles a year-old circular that directed medical officers “diligently to collect, and -o forward to the office of the Surgeon General, all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which may be regarded as valuable.”

Major General Sickles promptly had his eg packed carefully in a coffinlike box and ent it, with his formal calling card bear ing the legend “Compliments of D.E.S..” to the new Army Medical Museum in Washington. After pathologists had ex-mined the specimen, the bone was preserved. For years, on the anniversary of he amputation. Peg Leg Sickles went to visit his missing member, often taking friends to join in the macabre ceremony.

Bits & Pieces. Last week, as the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology celebrated :he centennial of its founding as the Army Medical Museum, tourists still admired an Sickles’ leg. They could also gape at a lock of Lincoln’s hair, a bone sliver from his skull, and bullet-shattered vertebrae from Assassin John Wilkes Booth and President James A. Garfield. But pathology, the study of disease processes, has far outgrown the two rear rooms above the Riggs Bank that first housed the Army Medical Museum. The institute, which is a combined effort of all three armed forces, now serves a score of civilian Government agencies; it works closely with independent medical groups and individual doctors around the world.

Unlike Sickles’ leg, the vast majority of the institute’s many specimens are not on view in its Independence Avenue museum; they are housed in the working quarters at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center six miles away. There, conscientiously filed, are 700,000 bits of preserved human (and some animal) tissue. There are 12 million pieces that were removed at operations and fixed in paraffin, 14 million slices in slides for microscope study, and 1.1 million case histories. Since 1922, the institute has collected and stored eyes that had to be removed because of disease. Fixed in formaldehyde, wrapped in gauze, and packed in numbered plastic bags is probably the world’s most comprehensive collection of hearts attacked by tumors.

Dyes & Light. The institute’s members have made their own great contributions to pathology. In 1864 it was one of the old museum’s first pathologists, Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward, who developed the use of newly discovered aniline dyes to stain tissues so that different components became more distinguishable. That same year Dr. Woodward took the first microscope photographs, using the sun as his light source. Major Walter Reed was the pathology museum’s curator when he went to Havana as head of the team that convicted mosquitoes of carrying yellow fever, making possible control of the disease—and completion of the Panama Canal. Institute pathologists developed the first typhoid vaccines, using themselves as guinea pigs.

To carry on the traditions of Woodward and Reed, the AFIP annually gives postgraduate training to scores of pathologists. It also gives short, intensive courses for pathology technicians. Last year pathologists from ten foreign countries attended the institute for advanced training. Last year 684.606 visitors also came to stare at Dan Sickles’ leg.