Patricia Flatley Brennan
Patricia Flatley Brennan is the director of the National Library of Medicine. Prior to that, she was the Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brennan received a master of science in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph. D. in industrial engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She served as chair of University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering's Department of Industrial Engineering from 2007 to 2010. Following seven years of clinical practice in critical care nursing and psychiatric nursing, Brennan held several academic positions, she developed ComputerLink, an electronic network designed to reduce isolation and improve self-care among home care patients. Brennan is the National Program Director of Project HealthDesign, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded initiative designed to stimulate the next generation of personal health records. In the context of that project, she coined the phrase "Observations of Daily Living" with her team, referring to observations people make about their health in everyday life.
Additionally, she leads the WI-TECNE project, a statewide nursing faculty development effort supported by HRSA that aims to improve the integration of informatics and telehealth into nursing curricula. As of June 2009, Brennan was a theme leader of the Living Environments Lab at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, researching home health care technologies using virtual reality and simulation technology. A fellow of both the American Academy of Nursing and the American College of Medical Informatics, Brennan was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2001. In 2016, she was appointed director of the National Library of Medicine, where her term started in August 2016
National Museum of Health and Medicine
The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a museum in Silver Spring, near Washington, DC. The museum was founded by U. S. Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond as the Army Medical Museum in 1862. An element of the Defense Health Agency, the NMHM is a member of the National Health Sciences Consortium; the AMM was established during the American Civil War as a center for the collection of specimens for research in military medicine and surgery. In 1862, Hammond directed medical officers in the field to collect "specimens of morbid anatomy...together with projectiles and foreign bodies removed" and to forward them to the newly founded museum for study. The AMM's first curator, John H. Brinton, visited mid-Atlantic battlefields and solicited contributions from doctors throughout the Union Army. During and after the war, AMM staff took pictures of wounded soldiers showing effects of gunshot wounds as well as results of amputations and other surgical procedures; the information collected was compiled into six volumes of The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, published between 1870 and 1883.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, AMM staff engaged in various types of medical research. They pioneered in photomicrographic techniques, established a library and cataloging system which formed the basis for the National Library of Medicine, led the AMM into research on infectious diseases while discovering the cause of yellow fever, they contributed to research on vaccinations for typhoid fever, during World War I, AMM staff were involved in vaccinations and health education campaigns, including major efforts to combat sexually transmissible diseases. By World War II, research at the AMM focused on pathology. In 1946 the AMM became a division of the new Army Institute of Pathology, which became the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 1949; the AMM's library and part of its archives were transferred to the National Library of Medicine when that institution was created in 1956. The AMM itself became the Medical Museum of the AFIP in 1949, the Armed Forces Medical Museum in 1974, the NMHM in 1989.
During its peak years on the National Mall in the 1960s, every year the Museum saw "as many as 400,000 to 500,000 people coming through". But after its moves to obscure and out-of-the-way sites, it fell into a period of relative neglect. By the 1990s, it was attracting 50,000 visitors a year. In 1989, C. Everett Koop commissioned the "National Museum of Health and Medicine Foundation", a private, nonprofit organization to explore avenues for its future development and revitalization, with the aim of returning its collection to a venue on the National Mall. Proposed was “a site on land, located east of and adjacent to the Hubert H. Humphrey Building ”. In 1993, a draft bill authored by Sen. Edward Kennedy proposed $21.8 million for moving the existing collection to a new facility to be constructed on that site. That bill, was never introduced owing to political difficulties including objections from Constance Breuer—widow of Marcel Breuer, architect of the Humphrey Building—who objected to the view obstruction that would be entailed by the proposed construction.
A letter from the Department of Defense to Koop in the mid-1990s, expressed hope that the NMHM exhibits would "one day be provided the appropriate and prominent home they deserve back at the National Mall in the new National Health Museum". But the DoD backed away from contributing to funding a new museum; the Foundation was superseded by a new organization, dedicated to creating a National Health Museum, focused on public health education. Although the effort for a physical museum appears to be defunct, the museum maintains a virtual prescence Due to the closure of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, National Museum of Health and Medicine has relocated—for the tenth time—to U. S. Army Garrison-Forest Glen in Silver Spring, Montgomery County, Maryland. Authority over the Forest Glen garrison was transferred from WRAMC to Fort Detrick in October 2008; the NMHM closed its exhibits on April 3, 2011, reopened in a new building on September 15, 2011. On October 1, 2015, the NMHM became part of the Defense Health Agency.
The NMHM embodies five collections consisting of about 25 million artifacts, including 5,000 skeletal specimens, 8,000 preserved organs, 12,000 items of medical equipment, an archive of historic medical documents, collections related to neuroanatomy and developmental anatomy. The museum's most famous artifacts relate to President Abraham Lincoln and his assassination on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth. On display are a copy by sculptor Avarel Fairbanks of Lincoln's life mask and hands made by Leonard Volk in 1860, the bullet fired from the Deringer pistol which ended the President's life, the probe used by the U. S. Army Surgeon General to locate the bullet during autopsy, pieces of Lincoln's hair and skull, the autopsy surgeon's shirt cuff, stained with Lincoln's blood. In 2010 the heirs of American pathologist Thomas Harvey transferred all of his holdings constituting the remains of Albert Einstein's brain to the NMHM, including 14 photographs of the whole brain never before revealed to the public.
Museum collections include: The Historical Collections document changes in medical technology since the early 19th century. Included in this growing assemblage of more than 12,000 objects are x-ray equipment, surgical instruments and anatomical models; the Anatomical Col
Microform
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage and printing. Microform images are reduced to about one twenty-fifth of the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used. All microform images may be provided as positives or negatives, more the latter. Three formats are common: microfilm and aperture cards. Microcards known as "microopaques" a format no longer produced, were similar to microfiche, but printed on cardboard rather than photographic film. Using the daguerreotype process, John Benjamin Dancer was one of the first to produce microphotographs, in 1839, he achieved a reduction ratio of 160:1. Dancer perfected his reduction procedures with Frederick Scott Archer's wet collodion process, developed in 1850–51, but he dismissed his decades-long work on microphotographs as a personal hobby, did not document his procedures; the idea that microphotography could be no more than a novelty was an opinion shared by the 1858 Dictionary of Photography, which called the process "somewhat trifling and childish".
Microphotography was first suggested as a document preservation method in 1851 by James Glaisher, an astronomer, in 1853 by John Herschel. Both men attended the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, where the exhibit on photography influenced Glaisher, he called it "the most remarkable discovery of modern times", argued in his official report for using microphotography to preserve documents. The pigeon post was in operation while Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Charles Barreswil, proposed the application of photographic methods with prints of a reduced size; the prints were on photographic paper and did not exceed 40mm to permit insertion in the pigeon's quill. The developments in microphotography continued through the next decades, but it was not until the turn of the century that its potential for practical usage was seized by a wider audience. In 1896, Canadian engineer Reginald A. Fessenden suggested microforms were a compact solution to engineers' unwieldy but consulted materials.
He proposed that up to 150,000,000 words could be made to fit in a square inch, that a one-foot cube could contain 1.5 million volumes. In 1906, Paul Otlet and Robert Goldschmidt proposed the livre microphotographique as a way to alleviate the cost and space limitations imposed by the codex format. Otlet’s overarching goal was to create a World Center Library of Juridical and Cultural Documentation, he saw microfiche as a way to offer a stable and durable format, inexpensive, easy to use, easy to reproduce, compact. In 1925, the team spoke of a massive library where each volume existed as master negatives and positives, where items were printed on demand for interested patrons. In the 1920s microfilm began to be used in a commercial setting. New York City banker George McCarthy was issued a patent in 1925 for his "Checkograph" machine, designed to make micrographic copies of cancelled checks for permanent storage by financial institutions. In 1928, the Eastman Kodak Company bought McCarthy's invention and began marketing check microfilming devices under its "Recordak" division.
Between 1927 and 1935, the Library of Congress microfilmed more than three million pages of books and manuscripts in the British Library. Binkley, which looked at microform’s potential to serve small print runs of academic or technical materials. In 1933, Charles C. Peters developed a method to microformat dissertations, in 1934 the United States National Agriculture Library implemented the first microform print-on-demand service, followed by a similar commercial concern, Science Service. In 1935, Kodak's Recordak division began filming and publishing The New York Times on reels of 35 millimeter microfilm, ushering in the era of newspaper preservation on film; this method of information storage received the sanction of the American Library Association at its annual meeting in 1936, when it endorsed microforms. Harvard University Library was the first major institution to realize the potential of microfilm to preserve broadsheets printed on high-acid newsprint and it launched its "Foreign Newspaper Project" to preserve such ephemeral publications in 1938.
Roll microfilm proved far more satisfactory as a storage medium than earlier methods of film information storage, such as the Photoscope, the Film-O-Graph, the Fiske-O-Scope, filmslides. The year 1938 saw another major event in the history of microfilm when University Microfilms International was established by Eugene Power. For the next half century, UMI would dominate the field and distributing microfilm editions of current and past publications and academic dissertations. After another short-lived name change, UMI was made a part of ProQuest Information and Learning in 2001. Systems that mount microfilm images in punched cards have been used for archival storage of engineering information. For example, when airlines demand archival engineering drawings to support purchased equipment, they specify punch-card-mounted microfilm with an industry-standard indexing system punched into the card; this permits automated reproduction, as well as permitting mechanical card-sorting equipment to sort and select microfilm drawings.
Aperture card mounted microfilm is 3% of the size and space of conventional paper or vellum engineering drawings. Some military contracts aroun
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the leading national public health institute of the United States. The CDC is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, its main goal is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease and disability in the US and internationally. The CDC focuses national attention on applying disease control and prevention, it focuses its attention on infectious disease, food borne pathogens, environmental health, occupational safety and health, health promotion, injury prevention and educational activities designed to improve the health of United States citizens. In addition, the CDC researches and provides information on non-infectious diseases such as obesity and diabetes and is a founding member of the International Association of National Public Health Institutes; the Communicable Disease Center was founded July 1, 1946, as the successor to the World War II Malaria Control in War Areas program of the Office of National Defense Malaria Control Activities.
Preceding its founding, organizations with global influence in malaria control were the Malaria Commission of the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation supported malaria control, sought to have the governments take over some of its efforts, collaborated with the agency; the new agency was a branch of the U. S. Public Health Service and Atlanta was chosen as the location because malaria was endemic in the Southern United States; the agency changed names before adopting the name Communicable Disease Center in 1946. Offices were located on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street. With a budget at the time of about $1 million, 59 percent of its personnel were engaged in mosquito abatement and habitat control with the objective of control and eradication of malaria in the United States. Among its 369 employees, the main jobs at CDC were entomology and engineering. In CDC's initial years, more than six and a half million homes were sprayed with DDT.
In 1946, there were only seven medical officers on duty and an early organization chart was drawn, somewhat fancifully, in the shape of a mosquito. Under Joseph Walter Mountin, the CDC continued to advocate for public health issues and pushed to extend its responsibilities to many other communicable diseases. In 1947, the CDC made a token payment of $10 to Emory University for 15 acres of land on Clifton Road in DeKalb County, still the home of CDC headquarters today. CDC employees collected the money to make the purchase; the benefactor behind the “gift” was Robert W. Woodruff, chairman of the board of The Coca-Cola Company. Woodruff had a long-time interest in malaria control, a problem in areas where he went hunting; the same year, the PHS transferred its San Francisco based plague laboratory into the CDC as the Epidemiology Division, a new Veterinary Diseases Division was established. An Epidemic Intelligence Service was established in 1951 due to biological warfare concerns arising from the Korean War.
The mission of CDC expanded beyond its original focus on malaria to include sexually transmitted diseases when the Venereal Disease Division of the U. S. Public Health Service was transferred to the CDC in 1957. Shortly thereafter, Tuberculosis Control was transferred to the CDC from PHS, in 1963 the Immunization program was established, it became the National Communicable Disease Center effective July 1, 1967. The organization was renamed the Center for Disease Control on June 24, 1970, Centers for Disease Control effective October 14, 1980. An act of the United States Congress appended the words "and Prevention" to the name effective October 27, 1992. However, Congress directed; the CDC focus has broadened to include chronic diseases, injury control, workplace hazards, environmental health threats, terrorism preparedness. CDC combats emerging diseases and other health risks, including birth defects, West Nile virus, avian and pandemic flu, E. coli, bioterrorism, to name a few. The organization would prove to be an important factor in preventing the abuse of penicillin.
In May 1994 the CDC admitted having sent several biological warfare agents to the Iraqi government from 1984 through 1989, including Botulinum toxin, West Nile virus, Yersinia pestis and Dengue fever virus. On April 21, 2005, then–CDC Director Julie Gerberding formally announced the reorganization of CDC to "confront the challenges of 21st-century health threats"; the four Coordinating Centers—established under the G. W. Bush Administration and Gerberding—"diminished the influence of national centers under umbrella", were ordered cut under the Obama Administration in 2009. Today, the CDC's Biosafety Level 4 laboratories are among the few that exist in the world, serve as one of only two official repositories of smallpox in the world; the second smallpox store resides at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the Russian Federation. The CDC revealed in 2014 that it had discovered several misplaced smallpox samples and that lab workers had been infected with anthrax.
The CDC is organized into "Centers and Offices", with each organizational unit implementing the agency's activi
United States Department of Defense
The Department of Defense is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States Armed Forces. The department is the largest employer in the world, with nearly 1.3 million active duty servicemen and women as of 2016. Adding to its employees are over 826,000 National Guardsmen and Reservists from the four services, over 732,000 civilians bringing the total to over 2.8 million employees. Headquartered at the Pentagon in Arlington, just outside Washington, D. C. the DoD's stated mission is to provide "the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security". The Department of Defense is headed by the Secretary of Defense, a cabinet-level head who reports directly to the President of the United States. Beneath the Department of Defense are three subordinate military departments: the United States Department of the Army, the United States Department of the Navy, the United States Department of the Air Force.
In addition, four national intelligence services are subordinate to the Department of Defense: the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office. Other Defense Agencies include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Health Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Security Service, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, all of which are under the command of the Secretary of Defense. Additionally, the Defense Contract Management Agency provides acquisition insight that matters, by delivering actionable acquisition intelligence from factory floor to the warfighter. Military operations are managed by ten functional Unified combatant commands; the Department of Defense operates several joint services schools, including the Eisenhower School and the National War College. The history of the defense of the United States started with the Continental Congress in 1775.
The creation of the United States Army was enacted on 14 June 1775. This coincides with the American holiday Flag Day; the Second Continental Congress would charter the United States Navy, on 13 October 1775, create the United States Marine Corps on 10 November 1775. The Preamble of the United States Constitution gave the authority to the federal government to defend its citizens: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Upon the seating of the first Congress on 4 March 1789, legislation to create a military defense force stagnated as they focused on other concerns relevant to setting up the new government. President George Washington went to Congress to remind them of their duty to establish a military twice during this time.
On the last day of the session, 29 September 1789, Congress created the War Department, historic forerunner of the Department of Defense. The War Department handled naval affairs until Congress created the Navy Department in 1798; the secretaries of each of these departments reported directly to the president as cabinet-level advisors until 1949, when all military departments became subordinate to the Secretary of Defense. After the end of World War II, President Harry Truman proposed creation of a unified department of national defense. In a special message to Congress on 19 December 1945, the President cited both wasteful military spending and inter-departmental conflicts. Deliberations in Congress went on for months focusing on the role of the military in society and the threat of granting too much military power to the executive. On 26 July 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, which set up a unified military command known as the "National Military Establishment", as well as creating the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, National Security Resources Board, United States Air Force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The act placed the National Military Establishment under the control of a single Secretary of Defense. The National Military Establishment formally began operations on 18 September, the day after the Senate confirmed James V. Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense; the National Military Establishment was renamed the "Department of Defense" on 10 August 1949 and absorbed the three cabinet-level military departments, in an amendment to the original 1947 law. Under the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958, channels of authority within the department were streamlined, while still maintaining the ordinary authority of the Military Departments to organize and equip their associated forces; the Act clarified the overall decision-making authority of the Secretary of Defense with respect to these subordinate Military Departments and more defined the operational chain of command over U. S. military forces as running from the president to the Secretary of Defense and to the unified combatant commanders.
Provided in this legislation was a centralized research authority, the Advanced Research Projects Agency known as DARPA. The act was written and promoted by the Eisenhower administration, was signed into law 6 August 1958; the Secretary of Defense, appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate, is by federal law (1
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the nation through the American Civil War, its bloodiest war and its greatest moral and political crisis, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, modernized the U. S. economy. Born in Kentucky, Lincoln grew up on the frontier in a poor family. Self-educated, he became Whig Party leader, state legislator and Congressman, he left government to resume his law practice, but angered by the success of Democrats in opening the prairie lands to slavery, reentered politics in 1854. He became a leader in the new Republican Party and gained national attention in 1858 for debating and losing to national Democratic leader Stephen A. Douglas in a Senate campaign, he ran for President in 1860, sweeping the North and winning. Southern pro-slavery elements took his win as proof that the North was rejecting the Constitutional rights of Southern states to practice slavery.
They began the process of seceding from the union. To secure its independence, the new Confederate States of America fired on Fort Sumter, one of the few U. S. forts in the South. Lincoln called up volunteers and militia to restore the Union; as the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South. Lincoln fought the factions by pitting them against each other, by distributing political patronage, by appealing to the American people, his Gettysburg Address became an iconic call for nationalism, equal rights and democracy. He suspended habeas corpus, he averted British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair. Lincoln supervised the war effort, including the selection of generals and the naval blockade that shut down the South's trade; as the war progressed, he maneuvered to end slavery, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Lincoln managed his own re-election campaign, he sought to reconcile his damaged nation by avoiding retribution against the secessionists.
A few days after the Battle of Appomattox Court House, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, on April 14, 1865, died the following day. Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the United States' martyr hero, he is ranked both by scholars and the public as among the greatest U. S. presidents. Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, as the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in a one-room log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky, he was a descendant of Samuel Lincoln, an Englishman who migrated from Hingham, Norfolk, to its namesake Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. Samuel's grandson and great-grandson began the family's westward migration, passing through New Jersey and Virginia. Lincoln's paternal grandfather and namesake, Captain Abraham Lincoln, moved the family from Virginia to Jefferson County, Kentucky, in the 1780s. Captain Lincoln was killed in an Indian raid in 1786, his children, including eight-year-old Thomas, Abraham's father, witnessed the attack.
Thomas worked at odd jobs in Kentucky and in Tennessee, before settling with members of his family in Hardin County, Kentucky, in the early 1800s. Lincoln's mother, Nancy, is assumed to have been the daughter of Lucy Hanks, although no record documents this. Thomas and Nancy married on June 12, 1806, in Washington County, moved to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, they produced three children: Sarah, born on February 10, 1807. Thomas Lincoln leased farms in Kentucky. Thomas became embroiled in legal disputes, lost all but 200 acres of his land in court disputes over property titles. In 1816, the family moved to Indiana, where the survey process was more reliable and land titles were more secure. Indiana was a "free" territory, they settled in an "unbroken forest" in Hurricane Township, Perry County. In 1860, Lincoln noted that the family's move to Indiana was "partly on account of slavery", but due to land title difficulties. In Kentucky and Indiana, Thomas worked as a farmer and carpenter, he owned farms, town lots and livestock, paid taxes, sat on juries, appraised estates, served on country slave patrols, guarded prisoners.
Thomas and Nancy were members of a Separate Baptists church, which forbade alcohol and slavery. Overcoming financial challenges, Thomas obtained clear title to 80 acres of land in what became known as the Little Pigeon Creek Community. On October 5, 1818, Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, leaving 11-year-old Sarah in charge of a household that included her father, 9-year-old Abraham, Dennis Hanks, Nancy's 19-year-old orphaned cousin; those who knew Lincoln recalled that he was distraught over his sister's death on January 20, 1828, while giving birth to a stillborn son. On December 2, 1819, Thomas married Sarah "Sally" Bush Johnston, a widow from Elizabethtown, with three children of her own. Abraham became close to his stepmother, whom he referred t
