Maude Abbott and the origin and mysterious disappearance of the Canadian Medical War Museum

From the mid-1960s a new breed of scientific instrument curators emerged in the United Kingdom. This small community of practice developed in parallel to but Context.—In the early 1900s, it was common practice to retain, prepare, and display instructive pathologic specimens to teach pathology to medical trainees and practitioners; these collections were called medical museums. Maude Abbott established her reputation by developing expertise in all aspects of medical museum work. She was afounder of the International Association of Medical Museums (later renamed the International Academy of Pathology) and became an internationally renowned expert on congenital heart disease. Her involvement in the Canadian Medical War Museum (CMWM) is less well known. Objective.—To explore Abbott’s role in the development of the CMWM during and after World War I and to trace its history. Design.—Available primary and secondary historical sources were reviewed. Results.—Instructive pathologic specimens derived from Canadian soldiers dying during World War I were shipped to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, which served as a clearinghouse for museum specimens from Dominion forces. The Canadian specimens were repatriated to Canada, prepared by Abbott, and displayed at several medical meetings. Abbott, because she was a woman, could not enlist and so she reported to a series of enlisted physicians with no expertise in museology. Plans for a permanent CMWM building in Ottawa eventually failed and Abbott maintained the collection at McGill (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) until her death in 1940. We trace the CMWM after her death. Conclusions.—Sadly, after Abbott had meticulously prepared these precious teaching specimens so that their previous owners’ ultimate sacrifice would continue to help their military brethren, the relics were bureaucratically lost

Port McNeill, British Columbia 1949

Relief shown by contours and spot heights.Color;1:50,00

08.05.003: "HMS Calypso (Salt Bulk) St. John’s NFL’D"

HMS Calypso (Salt Bulk) St. John’s NFL’D, inscribed in pencil on verso: b&w; 16.1 x 21.5 cm [new print of original photo], Canada: Department of National Defence [19-

A what-and-where fusion neural network for recognition and tracking of multiple radar emitters

A neural network recognition and tracking system is proposed for classification of radar pulses in autonomous Electronic Support Measure systems. Radar type information is combined with position-specific information from active emitters in a scene. Type-specific parameters of the input pulse stream are fed to a neural network classifier trained on samples of data collected in the field. Meanwhile, a clustering algorithm is used to separate pulses from different emitters according to position-specific parameters of the input pulse stream. Classifier responses corresponding to different emitters are separated into tracks, or trajectories, one per active emitter, allowing for more accurate identification of radar types based on multiple views of emitter data along each emitter trajectory. Such a What-and-Where fusion strategy is motivated by a similar subdivision of labor in the brain. The fuzzy ARTMAP neural network is used to classify streams of pulses according to radar type using their functional parameters. Simulation results obtained with a radar pulse data set indicate that fuzzy ARTMAP compares favorably to several other approaches when performance is measured in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. Incorporation int