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A home for medicine's history and heritage

Progress is being made in the important effort to establish a National Health Museum

Editorial. Jan. 16, 2006.

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Visitors to downtown Washington, D.C., are presented with what may be the world's finest and most comprehensive collection of museums, covering everything from fine art to the history of aviation.

What's missing from this collection on the National Mall, in the eyes of many medical leaders, is an institution devoted to the history and heritage of medicine.

The leaders of the movement to develop a National Health Museum are moving to fill that void.

The museum's chair, former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, MD, points out that Washington's existing national museums draw some 25 million visitors a year, many of whom are students who gain inspiration for their futures by the sights they see and the stories to which they are exposed. And the heritage of medicine is rich with exactly such visions.

Think of the groundbreaking advances of the past -- the achievement of blood bank pioneer Charles Drew, MD, or the development by Jonas Salk, MD, of a life-saving polio vaccine. But there's also medical science's promise -- a glimpse of the human genome, for instance -- that will continue to unfold.

The museum embodies the dream of combining these and many other impressions that illustrate medicine's rich heritage. But it will also be unique and digitally advanced -- with both a physical and virtual presence and high-tech exhibits. All told, the hope is that the experience it provides will have a significant impact on our nation's science and math educational resurgence, even igniting young people's desires to grow up in medicine, becoming biological researchers, medical epidemiologists or surgeons, just to name a few examples.