A McGill doctor, staff member and graduate student are doing what no one at the university has done in almost 100 years: giving McGill's little-known collection of Civil War-era medical specimens the attention they deserve.
Dr. Richard Fraser, a professor in the pathology department of McGill's medical school, has designed and overseen the construction of an exhibit in the Osler Library of Medical History that seeks to shine some light on part of McGill's neglected medical collection, specifically bones donated by the US Army that date back to the American Civil War.
According to Fraser, in the 1860s the US Surgeon General decided there should be a method to study the wounds soldiers sustained in Civil War battles, in order to better learn how to treat future injuries. Specimens such as amputated limbs or severed skulls were collected from battlefield hospitals and kept in US Army museums in Washington.
When McGill's own medical museum, one of the primary institutions to teach medical students in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, suffered a devastating fire in 1907, the Army accepted McGill's request to help replenish its collection.
According to Fraser, the Army Medical Museum curator donated about 1200 specimens, of which roughly 120 remain. About 30 to 35 of these specimens date specifically from the Civil War, and they are the main focus of the exhibit.
"The exhibit started because I was interested in preserving some of the history that was associated with the pathology department," Fraser said. "In the late 1990s I went around the Duff Building looking in the cupboards and in the basement that had been left for years to gather dust, to see if anything was there. I found a bunch of boxes that had bones in them, and I was curious to know where they came from ... A bit of research into the bones when I took them out of the boxes showed where they came from, from the Civil War and what was then the Army Medical Museum."
