RESUMEN
In his travelogue of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, What Ben Beverly Saw at the Great Exposition, James L. Dale described an exhibit that impressed him with both wonder and horror: a set of photographs documenting the outcomes of surgical operations that suggested procedures "of the most fearful character, which would seem impossible to perform, and the poor patient survive." What Dale described was the US Army Medical pavilion, where the displays were designed to convince domestic and international visitors of the professionalism and innovation of American medicine and in particular to highlight the contributions of military medicine. The medical building included a full-size model of an army field hospital and multiple exhibits constituting a representative sampling of collections from the US Army Medical Museum: photographic portraits of famous surgeons; enlarged microphotographs of blood, bone, and tissue samples; images of Civil War wounds and their treatments; artifacts and supplies for surgical procedures; and a painting, Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic. Together, this collection of artifacts presented viewers with a narrative of the current American medical field, with special focus on the Civil War as a catalyst for new medical discoveries. While Eakins's painting became the most famous image from the pavilion, it was not part of the original display, which was explicitly designed to demonstrate how surgeons and medical researchers used healing knowledge to transcend the devastation of the Civil War. This essay examines the exhibit's roots in wartime medicine and research and studies how Dr. Joseph Janvier Woodward planned and developed the exhibit to communicate with the public about current medical and surgical practice.
