Museum Acquires George Washington School of Medicine Collection

The National Museum of Health and Medicine has acquired the human development collection of the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. The donation was made by the medical school's gross anatomy department, facilitated by Dr. Raymond J. Walsh, department chairman. The collection consists of approximately 50 specimens ranging in age from 10 weeks to 6 months and was added to the holdings of the museum's Human Developmental Anatomy Center. The donation includes representative objects from stages of post-embryonic, pre-natal development of 10 weeks to 6 months old. Many of the specimens are mounted specifically for study and display, while seven have been prepared and stained to highlight the developing skeleton.

The teaching collection was developed by Frank D. Allen, Ph.D. for use by the school's students from the 1950s through 1990. Dr. Allen, now professor emeritus, is currently working on a series of philosophical essays about his experiences teaching and studying embryology and development.

The museum's Human Developmental Anatomy Center (HDAC) maintains and archives the largest collection of human and comparative developmental material in the world. The collection includes normal human embryos and abnormal specimens commonly used for non-destructive research, related photographs, illustrations, models and publications. The core of the center is the Carnegie Human Embryology Collection, which is world-renowned and the most extensive collection of its kind.

The collaborative Visible Embryo Project of high-tech data sets funded by the National Library of Medicine is based on the collections in the museum's HDAC. Its imaging activities have generated magnetic resonance microscopy datasets that have been used in the creation of an electronic database of 3-D embryological development, popular press books on the developing human, research into spatial genomics (the mapping of gene expression in 3-D volumes), and models of development for teaching. Images of histological sections have also been used in modeling and development of more traditional atlases of developmental anatomy. HDAC will also be collecting helical CT and MRI datasets for representative periods in post-embryonic development to provide as complete a visual sequence as possible.