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A History of the National Library of Medicine: The Nation's Treasury of Medical Knoweldge

. (1992)

Abstract

The word library is no longer adequate for the National Library of Medicine,A as Wyndham Miles makes abundantly clear in this splendid and searchinghistory. The NLM and its offspring have become the central nervous systemof American medical thought and research. My unlikely association with theLibrary goes back more than 50 years because of the Library's juxtaposition to~the old Army Medical Museum. As a lad I visited the Museum out of nothingbetter than morbid curiosity and then wandered around the Surgeon General'sLibrary. Decades later it was my good fortune to be a member of the Boardof Regents twice over a 12-year span that saw a changing in the guard and themovement from the Old Red Building on the Mall to the present site inBethesda.Few people besides parents can form any reasonable opinion of a newbornbabe's future greatness. The birth of an almost invisible library occurred whenthe brand new Army Surgeon General Lovell needed a few medical books ofhis own in 1818. The story of the growth and transformation of the Library asit grew up to be a supremely valuable central nervous network of medicalmemory is detailed in a fashion which embodies Wyndham Miles' dedication,thoroughness, great concentration, and endurance. He has made what mighthave been a mere chronicle into a story of imagination, of organizations, ofideas, and of many remarkably dedicated persons, military and civilian. Undera variety of governmental auspices they have managed to perform miracles.For there to be an Army medical library there had to be an Army MedicalDepartment, which was established in 1818 when Joseph Lovell became Sur-geon General. A list of the Library's very small holdings was written in a thinnotebook in 1840. By the latter part of the Civil War a printed catalog noted485 titles including about 50 journals. The total number of volumes was a littleover 2,000. The shape which the Library took and its remarkable importance as repositoryand source of a great index are the work of that remarkable genius John ShawBillings who was the library from 1865 to 1895. In the days of candles andkerosene lamps, before air conditioning, the Library, under Billings' impetus,produced its first general catalog in volume after volume. This catalog wouldhave amounted to very little if Billings had not been a master buyer andexchanger and had not learned the ways of book dealers in American citiesand, in particular, those of British and European agents. The massive catalogsand indexes represent in a unique way the work of one person aided, to besure, by soldier clerks, scribes, and some professional catalogers.

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