D.C Part 3 – Gross Anatomy

These pictures are from the National Museum of Health and Medicine. This museum was started during the civil war as a way for surgeons to learn new and improved reconstruction techniques for all the soldiers who were mutilated in the war. I came here on a class field trip in 5th grade and for years thought I was misremembering the details, because there’s no way you would take a 5th grader to see a collection of diseased genitals in jars, but it was all here. I didn’t take a picture of it, but they also had the bullet that killed Lincoln along with parts of his brain. I only mention that because a few weeks later in Detroit I saw the chair he was sitting in when he was shot.