Mesa Science at the National Museum for Health and Medicine

November 8, 2016

Recently, Michael Mesa, MSA President and CEO, was invited by Dr. Adrianne Noe , the curator of the National Museum for Health and Medicine (NMHM) to join her and her staff for a private guided tour of the museum. The trip was arranged following a request from Dr. Noe and Mr. Chan from the pentagon for a briefing on the history of the development of automatic syringes for the self-administration of drugs and antidotes by individual soldiers in the field. Following a telephonic briefing on this subject, Dr. Noe graciously extended an invitation to Mr. Mesa for an escorted tour of the Museum

The NMHM was established by order of the Surgeon General of the Army during the civil war and has been in continuous operation since. The Museum now contains over 25,000,000 medical artifacts including some items which cannot be found anywhere else. Mr. Mesa was quoted saying, “The Museum’s collection of pathological specimens, medical artifacts, medical illustrations and photographs comprise an incomparable source for the study of military medicine”. The Museum is located on Linden Lane in Silver Spring MD.

As a result of the tour and the briefing Mr. Mesa agreed to help provide the history of auto-injectors used by the US military and to assemble examples of these devices so that they  might be displayed at the museum. To this end Mr. Mesa gave Dr. Noe a copy of an article he had written, chronicling the developmental history of auto-injectors. The Article, originally published in Drug Delivery Technology in 2009 is titled Auto-Injector Evolution: From Battlefield to Backpack.

“This was a breath taking experience” said Mr. Mesa. Anyone with an interest in medicine, especially military medicine, should make the trip to Linden lane and the NMHM “.