Lecture October 7, 1988
16/19

Remarks Re: A National health Museum

BY

    C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
      Surgeon General
           Of the
     U.S. Public Health Service
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

     Presented at the
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
    October 7, 1988

This short piece is included in this archive because I wish to draw attention to the
National Health Museum and my role in it. An oversimplified history would take us back
to the Civil War and the fact that the Surgeon General of the Army put his microscopes
and some other memorabilia into one place which became known not as the Health
Museum-but as the building that housed it, namely, "the old red brick building". Many
present members of Congress were brought by their parents to see the artifacts and
monstrosities on exhibit in "the old red brick building" which passed for the only thing
resembling a health museum in the nation's capitol.

It is said that there were approximately a quarter of a million artifacts that were stored not
only "in front of the house" but also in storage areas in Maryland, Virginia and the
District of Columbia.

The next event of note was that Lady Byrd Johnson got friendly with the Hirschhorns and
did health and any kind of a health museum a terrible disservice by getting Democratic
support in Congress for the untruth that "the old red brick building" which was a national
land mark was so not because it was a building but because it had a special collection in
it. This was in a sense true but the law, which did have to do with buildings. Mrs.
Johnson had "the old red brick building" declassified as a historic landmark, it was tom
down and the Hirschhorn Museum of Art, in a shape of a bagel, was erected on its site on
the mall. The half-hearted promise that a new building would be found for the collection
in "the old red brick building" was never pursued and the artifacts were added to storage
areas and a very small "front of the store" collection was housed in one of the buildings
of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. This is some distance from the other sites that
draw tourists to Washington, it necessitated a trip through a downtrodden neighborhood,
and when the persistent visitor arrived at the site there were six parking spaces and a very
small exhibit.

My major office was on the 7* floor of the Humphrey Building on Independence
Avenue. And right in the front of that building along the edge of a reflecting pool I saw


literally hundreds of high school classes making their spring trip to Washington stand to
be photographed. It slowly dawned on me that those youngsters could be stimulated to
pursue almost any field available to them as a career but nothing in Washington would
stimulate them in health care, medicine, nursing, and other health allied professions.

I talked about it here and there and eventually a committee was formed. And eventually
an organization called" The National Health Museum Foundation" was established as a
501-C3 non-profit corporation and as soon as I left my second term as Surgeon General I
assumed the presidency of that foundation.

The next step was to work with the Army, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and
others and try to make plans for a building to house the considerable collection
mentioned above. However, my chief aim was not to build a curio shop but to have a
health education center that would stress prevention. Our plans grew on that solid
foundation.

The foundation eventually gave way to the National Health Museum and we had a
skeleton staff which included a director. And we had the support initially of a lot of
people in Congress who had fond recollections of "the old red brick building" and were
not terribly pleased with the way Lady Byrd Johnson had managed to get it off the mall.

However, economic times changed. In the beginning we had been told that the
government would build the building for us on a site on or near the mall and that they
would make an appropriation annually to this end so that eventually the building would
be unencumbered with debt. Later the bottom more or less fell out of the economic
support and some of our strongest senatorial supporters moved on to private life.  The
first thing that anyone asks is, why isn't this a part of the Smithsonian? That is the first
place that we went and the Smithsonian made it very clear that they were interested in
health, hoped that we would succeed in our endeavor, but that they wanted nothing to do
with health because it was just too complicated on top of everything else they were trying
to accomplish in the world of museums in Washington.

Another factor that most people don't think about was this: If anyone wished to build a
health museum anyplace in the country it could be done very promptly, it could be built
as simply as being constructed of poured concrete. It could be expected to be up and
going in four years collecting revenues from visitors. On the other hand a museum built
in Washington is a national monument and instead of poured concrete one has to have
something like imported Italian marble. In addition to that there is an unbelievable list of
agencies and authorities through which all kinds of permissions have to go which include
the Capitol Planning Commission, the White House Architect, the Capitol Architect, the
Arts Commission of Washington, and on and on it goes. In modem days the time from
having a pep rally at the site of a museum planned for the future and the actual date of
breaking ground runs about 15 to 19 years.

I stuck with the museum from 1988 until 2001 and then resigned from the chairmanship
of the board because I felt that the kind of money we would now have to seek from the

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private sector could best be raised by somebody of wealth and I certainly was not that
somebody. This is being written in the summer of 2003 and we are truthfully no nearer a
site then we were at the time these remarks were first delivered.

I would like to, but think it is not appropriate, to report to the user of this archive the
pettiness, the self-seeking, the dog-in-the-manger attitude that we ran into from members
of Congress, officials in the District of Columbia, private entrepreneurs, and multiple
government agencies. There are people who don't want to see a health museum in
Washington unless there is in some way that they can get the credit for it and there are
others that seem to be nothing more high-minded than spoilers.

The attached remarks are those that I made in enthusiasm and sincerity before I came to
have the cynical jaundiced view I now carry.

I think the vision is worth reading about.