Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of Health and Medicine began as a Civil War collection but has grown to include rare scientific instruments and unusual pathological specimens

Think Washington, D.C., museums and you’ll most likely remember a trip to one of the fabulous Smithsonian museums, such as the Hirshhorn, with collections of paintings and sculpture. One museum, however, that is under the radar but certainly merits more attention is the National Museum of Health and Medicine. This strange and under-visited museum, located on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, is the repository of 24 million pathological and anatomical specimens, artifacts, photographs and medical instruments documenting the history of medical practice.

The museum was established during the U.S. Civil War, originally as a collection of objects relating to military medicine of the period. Later, however, the museum became a medical research centre that focused on infectious diseases and on collections to support research in pathology. The museum’s exhibits—and just 1% of its collection is on display—are fascinating if a bit gory.

The most visited section is the gallery of Civil War battlefield medicine. Included are medical “bags” of the time, which were beautiful polished wooden boxes, with hand-crafted brass, ebony or ivory medical instruments, such as saws of all dimensions for battlefield amputations, and photographs of battlefield surgery.

Since the museum was established in 1862 for medical research and to preserve history, the Civil War section also has bits of bone pierced by a variety of projectiles; evidence of the ferocity as the North engaged in pitched battles with the South to save the union and abolish slavery. The most curious in this display is the amputated leg of a famous general who, after the war, often brought friends to the museum to view his own encased limb that had been shattered by a cannon ball.

But certainly the most popular projectile in the collection is the one that killed the 16th president of the U.S., Abraham Lincoln. There are also fragments of the famous leader’s skull and a bloodied sleeve of the surgeon who struggled to save Lincoln’s life. The surgeon, with an eye to history, purportedly said of his own bloodied shirt, “If this is the President’s blood, we should save it.” Other presidential body parts are represented throughout the museum, such as James Garfield’s spine and Dwight Eisenhower’s gallstones.

The museum houses close to 1,000 microscopes, including this ornate version used by Robert Hooke in the 17th century.

The museum also houses nearly 1,000 rare and beautiful microscopes, the largest collection of microscopes in the world. There are microscopes from as far back as 1632(Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s tiny device)and the first electron microscope, a clunky huge bit of white steel that looks like an industrial stove. One of the treasures in the collection is the 17th-century microscope used by Robert Hooke when he wrote the first book detailing observations about cells. The microscope, so elegant in its design and so significant historically, is made of wood, gold-tooled leather and brass.

For those who want to get nostalgic about the calmer good old days, one gallery is replete with an installation of a doctor’s office of the 1930s. The same gallery has a silver iron lung and, rescued from an old shoe store, a fluoroscope where many children must have spent happy times looking at the green glow of their foot bones.

There are endless pathology exhibits, which may leave non-medical visitors squirming, but for health-care professionals who may have only seen cases such as these in textbooks, the specimens are fascinating. In one area there are blackened lungs, the embalmed head and shoulders of a patient poisoned by arsenic and, floating in a large bottle of formaldehyde, the amputated leg, foot and a scrotum the size of a dinner plate that had been ravaged by elephantiasis.

And for the kids(or the kid in all of us), there is an up-close and personal look at the science of bloodletting. The exhibit of this old technique, now enjoying a resurgence of popularity, includes not only brass cups and little lances, but also the opportunity to watch live leeches lunching on bits of fresh liver.

For folks with a penchant for pathology, this museum is a mecca. Discomfort aside, there is something profound about a visit to a place that so explicitly documents the consequences of wars on its participants.(There is an exhibit of prosthetics ranging from hand-crafted “peg legs” to today’s high-tech Cheetah leg.)This is a museum that is likely to make conflict resolution junkies out of the most hawkish. Arriving and leaving through the Walter Reed Army Hospital grounds, where young soldiers practise on their new prosthetics or are wheeled around by family members, gives the museum exhibits a kind of immediacy.

Judith Ritter is a freelance writer in Montreal.

Live Leeches.	The bullet that killed Lincoln.	Civil war general 's amputated leg bone next to a cannon ball.