PHYSICIAN'S EQUIPMENT DONATED TO MUSEUM
(Click on a photo to see larger image)

The National Museum of Health and Medicine has received several items from the estate of Dr. Gabriel Kirschenbaum, a general practitioner who maintained a private medical practice for many years out of his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

As chief medical adviser to the director of the New York City Selective Service System in the 1970s, Kirschenbaum headed an advisory board of 42 medical experts in various fields who were available to the city's 153 local draft boards for consultation. He received no compensation for the chief's position, to which he was named after about 20 years service.

Featured in the October 1970 issue of "Selective Service News," Kirschenbaum, then 70 years old, was described as looking "disbelievingly at photographs which show his hair glowing white and the lines of age which ever so often wrinkle his face."

The article also said he preferred "to live in and among the many mementos of a busy and fruitful life. Honorary degrees, society memberships, tokens of friendships that traverse miles and time, adorn his office walls. Each piece of furniture in the doctor's waiting room has a story in itself."

Among the items received by the museum was an "EKG computator," a slide-rule-like device Kirschenbaum co-invented to enable physicians and technicians to compute "easily and quickly such factors that are essential in the correct interpretation of electrocardiograms." It was copyrighted by the Library of Congress in 1941 and sold for $4.95 each.

Received by the museum for its collection are items from the 1930s to 1950s:

• an operating room table used in the old Manhattan General Hospital in New York City
• a lightbox manufactured by Humphries Roentgen Co.
• a Jones basal metabolism gas machine manufactured by Middlewest Instrument Co., used during the mid 20th century to measure the breathing rate and oxygen consumption of a patient at rest
• the right side of a male skeleton, a cutaway skull showing internal structures, and microscope slides of normal and pathological tissues from humans and animals
• objects and papers documenting Kirschenbaum's Parkinson's Disease research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the 1950s
• roentgenology wall charts with typed notes
• a Selective Service chart presentation, including photos documenting the medical examination process of recruits inducted into the military.

Born in 1900, Kirschenbaum graduated from the New York Medical College in 1925, and was honored by the college on the 50th anniversary of his graduation in 1975. He successfully completed an atomic casualties medical care course in 1956 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Kirschenbaum was elected a member of the Radiological Society of North America in 1936 and was also a member of the American College of Cardiology and a fellow of the New York Cardiological Society. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Health as well as a fellow with honorary life membership in the American International Academy.

He was also a member of the Pan American Medical Association, and in 1962 he received an award of appreciation for his support for the organization.

The items have been added to the museum's historical collection, which documents changes in medical technology since the early 17th century and includes objects ranging in size from a suture needle to a two-ton MRI magnet, such as X-ray equipment, microscopes, surgical instruments, numismatics, and anatomical models.