New Home Prescribed for an Obscure Museum

The bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln lies in a glass display case alongside his doctor’s bloodstained shirt cuffs. Around the corner, dental instruments thought to belong to Paul Revere hang from a wall.

Nearby is the leg bone of Dan Sickles, a Civil War general who preserved his shot-off limb for posterity at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and visited it occasionally.

It’s a museum where such quirkiness is commonplace but rarely seen by the millions who visit Washington every year.

Congress has joined in an effort to change that by building a prominent new home for the museum’s exhibits near the National Mall where many of the capital’s main monuments are. Tucked inside a spending bill President Clinton recently signed is $500,000 for a commission to develop a plan for a National Health Museum.

Hidden on an Army base far from the monuments, the current museum is inaccessible by public transportation. The few visitors who do track it down must pass through a military gate and show personal identification if they visit on weekends.

“Those collections belong at the Mall,” said Mark Dunham, spokesman for the congressionally endorsed project. “They’ve been shoved to the sides for too long.”

Once a plan is in place, backers can begin raising about $100 million to create the museum.

The project has been stalled for years as debates played out over who would control and pay for the museum. The original plan was to move the museum to the Mall area, with the Department of Defense footing the bill for a new building.

A few years ago, budgets tightened, and the Pentagon made it clear it was not in the museum business. Backers concluded that they would have to raise almost all the money privately and began pursuing the project independently.

Leading the effort is C. Everett Koop, a former surgeon general, who visited the Army museum as a 10-year-old aspiring doctor. He remembers seeing skeletons of embryos at various stages before birth and a giant leg sick with elephantiasis, a disease that causes massive swelling.

“It was fascinating,” Koop said.

That was during the museum’s heyday, when it sat on the Mall next to the Smithsonian Castle and attracted nearly 1 million visitors a year. In 1968, it was moved to make room for a modern art museum.

Now Koop and others are campaigning to bring it back from its exile at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where attendance is expected to be about 45,000 this year.

They have raised about $2 million and are confident they can raise millions more, noting that health care accounts for one of every seven dollars spent in the United States.

They envision an interactive museum that would bring health issues into focus: a healthy lung beside a smoker’s lung, for instance, or the chance to use a computer to simulate performing surgery. Virtual reality would bring visitors inside the human anatomy, give them a bird’s-eye view of an operating table or trace the pathways of the brain.

The museum also undoubtedly would include the Army museum’s collections, among them the world’s most comprehensive set of microscopes, a large collection of Civil War skeletons, deformed but preserved fetuses.

But Koop emphasizes that the museum will be about more than relics.

“I’m not interested in building a curio shop,” he said. “I’m interested in an interactive museum.”

The existing museum has a variety of fascinating, sometimes interactive, exhibits of its own. A section on pregnancy shows an ultrasound film of a fetus and allows visitors to try on an outfit that makes them feel as if they’re pregnant.

A plastic container shows a huge pile of cigarette butts, representing the number accumulated in a month by a pack-a-day smoker.

An exhibit on AIDS discusses the history of sexually transmitted diseases, explains that condoms help prevent AIDS and tells the story of Ron Wogaman, who died of AIDS in 1991.

And a group of teenagers had a great time with an interactive program on nutrition. They tried to plan the most fattening--and, with less interest, the healthiest--meal they could. They managed to rack up 171 grams of fat for dinner--five times the recommended daily allowance.

Founded as part of the Defense Department in 1862, the museum was the nation’s first federal medical research facility. Museum doctors fought battlefield diseases during the Civil War and were called when Lincoln was shot.

During World War II, the museum studied diseases that soldiers were exposed to and provided medical support for the troops.

By 1955, the museum had found a home on the National Mall. It was pushed out during the Johnson administration, when a new location on the Mall was “promised but never worked out,” said Koop.

In the meantime, the Army museum is trying to attract more visitors. It’s advertising in newspapers, recruiting tour groups and sending exhibits on the road. Its leaders don’t foresee closing its doors.

“Until we’re told otherwise,” museum spokeswoman Carole Mahoney said, “we’re going to continue chugging forward.”