It's Spring of 1862, a year into the Civil War, and soldiers are dying by the tens

of thousands on battlefields all across the U.S.

A 34-year-old named William Hammond has recently been named as the new Army Surgeon General

by Abraham Lincoln.

Hammond is young, he's brash, he's got a ton of ideas.

He redesigns the Army medical wagons to be more efficient.

He designs new types of hospitals and demands better record keeping.

He also makes his bosses furious.

He was court-martialed within three years.

Hammond was kind of prickly and proud and ran into a prickly and proud secretary of work,

so he was given the heat fall with slightly trumped up charges of providing blankets to

confederate prisoners.

That's my Brody, we'll come back to him in a minute.

Anyway, one of the projects young Hammond had started in his short time as Army Surgeon

General.

It had an unusual goal.

He wanted to collect, quote, all specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical and medical, which

may be regarded as valuable.

So the initial founding of the museum was to collect specimens of both surgical interest,

which usually was an amputated limb, or a wet tissue part, like a colon.

And the idea was to write a medical and surgical history of the War of the Rebellion.

What started with three dried and varnish specimens of the human body would grow into an

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