Michael Rhode has been chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, a division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, since 1989. Prior to that he was an archives technician at the National Archives and Records Administration.
He received a bachelor’s degree in history from George Washington University in 1987. Rhode is currently a member of the American Association of the History of Medicine. He has authored numerous papers and articles as well as made many presentations on medical history. Exhibits that he has curated include "American Angels of Mercy: Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee's Pictorial Record of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904" in 2001 and "Battlefield Surgery 101: From the Civil War to Vietnam" in 2004. He co-authored the exhibit catalogues for both shows as well.
Rhode has also written exhibits on the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. He has co-written "From Individual Trauma to National Policy: Tracking the Uses of Civil War Veteran Medical Records," a chapter in "Disabled Veterans In History," as well as the foreword to "Photographic Atlas of Civil War Injuries."
Since 1994 he has been a member of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s Human Subjects Experimentation Committee/ Institutional Review Board. He is a former steering committee member of the Science, Technology & Healthcare Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists. Rhode held Top Secret Security clearances from both the National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Department of State. A collector of comic books and an editorial board member of the “International Journal of Comic Art,” Rhode resides in Arlington, Va. with his wife and daughter.