Daniel Smith Lamb (1843–1929): A window into the early histories of the Army Medical Museum and Howard University Medical School

Abstract

U.S. Army doctor Daniel Smith Lamb was a significant figure in the history of American pathology during its formative years. For 55 years (1865–1920), Lamb performed hundreds of autopsies in and around Washington, D.C. and personally collected over 1,500 gross pathology specimens for the Army Medical Museum. His work began at the close of the Civil War and continued on through World War I, contributing substantially to gross pathological and histological studies that documented wartime pathology, thus further contributing to the training of Army doctors. Specimens he collected also include material from autopsies he conducted on President James Garfield, his assassin Charles Guiteau, and other historical figures. Under the auspices of the Army Medical Museum, he conducted autopsies across the city of Washington for the museum's collection, many of which survive to this day at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. He served under 12 U.S. Army Surgeons General and 11 Museum Curators and was noted to be a steadying influence during a time of constant leadership changes at that institution. Lamb was known throughout Washington, D.C. as an advocate of medical education for African‐Americans and women. While working at the Museum, he simultaneously served for 46 years as professor of anatomy at Howard University (1877–1923). He wrote seminal histories of the institutions with which he was associated and in so doing also contributed significantly to the study of the history of medicine.

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“…Just a year after the formation of the IAMM, the Army Medical Museum, the predecessor of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington, D.C. sent 1200 specimens to McGill University in Montreal, Canada after a fire destroyed many of their teaching specimens. In fact, Maude Abbott, the curator of the McGill museum, received teaching specimens under the auspices of the IAMM from all around the world, including over 200 from Berlin and many from London (Henry, 1964; MacDermot, 1941; Waugh, 1992; Wright & Spatalo, 2020); Abbott directly acknowledged (i.e., implicated) McGill's then dean of medicine, who had been visiting medical centers in Europe shortly after the fire for obtaining the “pickled specimens” (Abbott, 1959, p. 147). When Richard Fraser, MD, the current director of the Maude Abbott Medical Museum at McGill University (https://www.mcgill.ca/medicalmuseum/), was asked about the specimens from the US Army Medical Museum and how they were received, he indicated that the 1910 Curator's Report of Donations Received in the Museums of the Medical Faculty of McGill University: With Descriptive List and Index of Specimens , provided by Maude Abbott, “documents in fair detail what was received by Abbott.” But “we have no records related to reception, shipping, etc.…”

“…During World War I, all the major warring factions collected autopsy‐derived instructive pathological specimens that could be used to help surgeons learn to better treat injured soldiers and to help physicians better understand and manage infectious diseases in military camps, including the 1918 influenza pandemic. It is well‐documented that the US, Canadian, British, Australian, German, and French forces shipped such specimens to populate national pathology war museums (Alberti, 2015; Wright et al, 2018; Wright & Baskin, 2015; Wright & Spatalo, 2020). During the War, the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London served as a common processing site for pathological specimens derived from all Commonwealth soldiers (Alberti, 2015; Wright et al, 2018).…”