830 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 989 



most completely useful collection of medical 

 works in the world. 



In some reminiscences of his younger 

 days he speaks of his student aspiration "to 

 try to establish for the use of American 

 physicians a fairly complete library and in 

 connection with this prepare a comprehen- 

 sive index which should spare medical 

 teachers and writers the drudgery of con- 

 sulting thousands or more indexes or the 

 turning over the leaves of many volumes 

 to find the dozen or more references of 

 which they might be in search." The 

 opportunity he craved when young came 

 now by singular good fortune into his pos- 

 session. When he took hold of this work, 

 the surgeon-general's library contained a 

 little over a thousand volumes and all inter- 

 est in its increase had been long at an end. 

 Fortunately, as I so understand, at the 

 close of the war there fell into the hands 

 of the surgeon-general some eighty-five 

 thousand dollars, the result of hospital sav- 

 ings during the great contest. He was 

 allowed to use this money for the building 

 up of the museum and of the library, which 

 was an essential adjunct to the collection. 

 It was a vast piece of good fortune that 

 this task fell to the man who had craved 

 such a chance since his youth. He brought 

 to it powers which are rarely united in one 

 man and an amount of knowledge of books, 

 medical and non-medical, which few pos- 

 sess. When he was nominated for member- 

 ship in the National Academy of Sciences, 

 his claim to this high distinction was judi- 

 ciously founded by his friends upon his 

 application of skill in the scientific classi- 

 fication of books and of the medical knowl- 

 edge of our profession through the cen- 

 turies. No medical librarian who ever 

 lived had, up to that time, shown such an 

 almost instinctive capacity for the scientific 

 classification of knowledge so as to make 

 it readily available. It was eminently a 



scientific gift and of incredible usefulness 

 in its results to the scholarship of medicine 

 throughout the world. 



When he gave up this charge at the time 

 of his appointment to the chair of hygiene 

 in the University of Pennsylvania, he re- 

 ceived from the physicians of Great Britain 

 and America at a dinner given in his honor 

 a silver box containing a cheque for ten 

 thousand dollars, as a material expression 

 of gratitude for the labor-saving value of 

 his catalogue. 



The surplus of this fund enabled his 

 friends to present to the Surgeon-General's 

 library an admirable portrait of John 

 Billings, by Cecelia Beaux. 



The library as he left it contained 307,455 

 volumes and pamphlets and 4,-335 portraits 

 of physicians. At the present day in the 

 skillful hands which took up his task, it 

 has reached over half a million volumes 

 and over five thousand portraits and has 

 a unique collection of medical journals 

 quite matchless elsewhere. 



He went about the preliminary measures 

 for the catalogue with cautious care and in 

 1876 prepared a specimen fasciculus of the 

 proposed catalogue of the library, consist- 

 ing of a combined index of authors and 

 subjects arranged in dictionary order, and 

 submitted it to the profession for criticism. 

 In this he was aided by his able assistant, 

 Dr. Kobert Fletcher. In the first series of 

 the index catalogue, 1880-1895, the mate- 

 rial was selected and a scientific classifica- 

 tion made by Billings. As a monthly supple- 

 ment to the index catalogue, the Index 

 Medicus was begun by Dr. Billings and 

 Dr. Fletcher in 1879 as an extra official 

 publication. When, in 1903, the second 

 series of the Index Medicus was issued, 

 it was seen that there was a risk of failure 

 in this invaluable publication through want 

 of means, but at this time by Dr. Billings's 

 influence through the aid of the Car- 



