These are your pictures. You should be able to see them.

[Masks worn during experiments with Plague. Philippines, probably around 1912]

Mike Rhode, the head archivist at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. is beginning to make a huge archive of military medical imagery available online (through flickr). The archive consists of over 500,000 images (that have thus far been scanned) of medical images from the Civil War to Vietnam. They are slowly but surely getting them online for the rest of us, on their own time [from Wired]:

The organization that runs the NMHM — the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, funded by the Department of Defense — hasn't signed off on Rhode's plan to bring medical history photos to the people.

"The Army does not appreciate people using Army resources for sites that they don't consider to be related to your job," Rhode said. Flickr, like many social media sites, is blocked by the Army.

Still, Rhode is continuing to push to get the photos, a precious resource, into the light of the internet.

"We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine," Rhode said. "We love the stuff that we're able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world."

The Library of Congress also has vast archives (though again, only a fraction of their materials are online) and has started placing things on flickr as well. [Though you can find even more in the archives on their own site]

[Christy Mathewson, warming up before pitching in the World Series, 1911]