The new Section was included in the Department of Arts and Industries, then under the curatorship of Assistant Director G. Brown Goode. From its beginning and for two decades, however, the Section of Materia Medica was sponsored and supervised by the U.S. Navy in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution. For this reason, the Navy decided not to establish a similar bureau for a health museum as did the Army in starting the Medical Museum (of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) in 1862 through the efforts of Dr. William Alexander Hammond. The Smithsonian did, however, provide a clerk to relieve the curator of much of the routine work. The Section's early vigorous activities were the result of the ingenuity of the first honorary curator, Dr. James Milton Flint (1838-1919), an Assistant Surgeon of the U.S. Navy. From the establishment of the Section, in 1881, to 1912, Dr. Flint was curator during separate periods for a total of nearly 25 years. For three of his tenures (1881-1884; 1887-1891; 1895-1900), he was detailed to the Smithsonian Institution by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy. During the interim periods, other naval doctors were detailed as curators. Finally, in 1900, Dr. Flint retired from the Navy with the rank of Rear Admiral and volunteered to continue his services to the National Museum. The proposal was gladly accepted and he continued as a curator until his retirement from the Smithsonian Institution in 1912. [Illustration: Figure 3.--REAR ADMIRAL JAMES M. FLINT, U.S. Navy surgeon and first honorary curator of the Section of Materia Medica. (_Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress._)] The Section commenced with a wealth of material. After the close of the 1876 centennial exhibition, its _materia medica_ collection had been stored with the other collections in a warehouse, awaiting an appropriation by Congress for transfer and installation. This collection was gradually brought into the new National Museum after that building's completion in 1881. Many other _materia medica_ specimens were transferred from the Department of Agriculture. In addition to these large collections of crude drugs, generous contributions came from several prominent pharmaceutical firms such as Parke, Davis & Company of Detroit, Michigan; Wallace Brothers of Statesville, North Carolina; and Schieffelin and Company of New York City. These manufacturing houses are mentioned here because they and their agents abroad were the first to take interest and donate to the Section, complete assortments of contemporary remedial agents then in common use throughout the United States and Europe, besides many hundreds of "rare and curious drugs." Thus, in spite of difficulties encountered from bringing several collections into the building at one time, the _materia medica_ exhibition got off to a good start.