visiblink's great post about Maui [1] got me thinking about doing a 
"review" style phlog post as well.  For biological reasons [2], I'm 
unable to do any long-distance travel recently, but I am lucky to live 
in an area with quite a few great museums.

I really enjoy visiting the less well-known museums and yesterday I was 
able to visit the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in 
Silver Spring, Maryland.  I should put quotes around "less well-known" 
though because many of these are still big, well-funded museums -- just 
not compared to the Smithsonians of the world.

The NMHM was originally established as the Army Medical Museum during 
the American Civil War, and has had consistent military support since 
then.  For this reason, a large focus of the museum is on health and 
injury from the military perspective.

In the early days of the museum, actual human specimens were collected 
from military casualties and amputations.  This was for the simple 
reason that xray and other imaging techniques did not exist and the 
medical field was only able to learn by inspecting the human body 
directly.  As imaging techniques changed, the collections in the museum 
changed, but human specimens remains the main focus.  Because of the 
emphasis on "pre-modern" medicine, it is important to note that this is 
not the Museum of "Modern" Health and Medicine.

How big is the museum?  It has 25 million specimens, although not all of 
them are on display.  There is a lot to see, and evidently a *lot* more 
for researchers who have access to the full collection.

A big focus of the museum is on Civil War injuries and medical care.  
There are many examples of bone injuries from bullets and from cannon 
balls.  Want to see how the projectile path of a Minié ball goes through 
a femur or a pelvis? You can see that here.  Want to see what happens 
when a cannon ball bounces off the ground and hits a horse rider's lower 
leg?  You can see that too.

A surprising anecdote I heard from the docent leading our tour was that 
many of the amputees (including the above-said horse rider) would visit 
the museum later in life to view their old appendages.  The horse rider, 
for example, was a famous general and he would annually bring an 
entourage through the museum to show off his war injury.

In addition to soldier injuries, perhaps the most famous exhibit in the 
museum is on Abraham Lincoln's assassination.  The museum has on display 
the exact bullet that killed Lincoln, along with (also on display) 
several of his skull fragments and the probe (a long metal stick) that 
was used to identify the location of the bullet in his head.  Head 
trauma care has certainly come a long way since then.

Other exhibits covered the effects of gas attacks in war, the use of 
anesthesia on the battlefield, the evolution of facial reconstruction 
methods, many different forms of past medical equipment, and exhibits on 
both normal and abnormal physiology.  

The exhibits on abnormal physiology are a little hard for younger 
visitors to experience.  My kids were rather surprised to see 
formaldehyde jar containing conjoined twins (well honestly, I was 
surprised about that too).  And my younger daughter had trouble falling 
asleep at night, saying she couldn't stop thinking about the giant 
severed leg of the elephantiasis sufferer.

But again, most of the museum is focused on war injuries.  We visited 
the museum on U.S. Memorial Day, and I think that was fairly fitting as 
a reminder of the horrors of war (from the soldier's perspective, not 
that off innocent non-combatants -- which is an entirely different 
story).

I would strongly recommend this museum to anyone doing the DC-area 
museum circuit.  It is very well curated yet it is layed out in a 
compact building that is easy to navigate.  If you set a pace, you can 
make it through the museum in around two hours.  And like a lot of the 
DC-area museums, admission is free.

In the future, I am looking forward to visiting other "less well-known" 
museums.  I have the National Electronics Museum [3] in mind.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190525
[2] baby due in approximately one month
[3] https://www.nationalelectronicsmuseum.org/