MEMORIAL OF DR. JOSEPH M. TONER. ()41 



set to work to gather up the obscure and forgotten facts, the disjecta 

 membra of his subject. With this aim he, for several years, had all 

 the exchanges of the newspaper offices searched for obituary notices 

 appearing from day to day, cut up the contents of biographical dic- 

 tionaries and directories of Congress, and ransacked all periodicals for 

 biographical sketches. The immense mass of material thus gathered he 

 had mounted upon uniform sheets of paper and arranged in strict alpha- 

 betical order, thus embodying for the readiest reference a great mass of 

 fugitive biographical data quite inaccessible to the ordinary inquirer. 

 This valuable index, arranged in two extensive cases of drawers, forma 

 a part of the Toner collection in the Congressional Library. 



In like manner the Doctor made another collection of obituaries and 

 biographical sketches of all American physicians commemorated in 

 periodicals. 



But the specially cherished design, very nearly fulfilled, of the lat 

 ter years of his life was the collection of an absolutely complete 

 assemblage of all the letters and other writings, printed and manu- 

 script, of George Washington. Dr. Toner had an idea that everything 

 which Washington wrote was valuable, or would become so, to his 

 countrymen. He found that the printed collections of Washington's 

 writings by Sparks and others, who permitted themselves to amend 

 the grammar, the style, and the orthography of their illustrious sub- 

 ject, are quite untrustworthy as transcripts of what he really wrote. 

 So he had strictly verbatim copies made of every paper in the vast 

 collection of the Department of State, and followed it up by securing 

 exact copies of every original Washington letter fouud in historical 

 societies and library collections, public and private, throughout this 

 country and in Europe. Where no access to an original could be had, 

 he procured and mounted printed copies, ransacking all American 

 books, periodicals and newspapers he could find, and watching every 

 print of a Washington letter, to seize it for his collection, if not already 

 there. This great thesaurus of Washiugtoniana, much the fullest yet 

 gathered in any one collection, he arranged in strict chronological order 

 of the papers, and deposited it in his lifetime in the Congressional 

 Library. Thus was performed a most useful and inestimable service 

 to the historical student. 



We may next view our associate as a patron of letters and a public 

 benefactor. He founded and endowed in 1872 a course of public lec- 

 tures, designed to encourage the discovery of new truths for the 

 advancement of medical science. He conveyed about $3,000 in real 

 and personal property to five trustees, consisting of the Secretary of 

 the Smithsonian Institution, the Surgeon- General of the United States 

 Army, the Surgeon-General of the Navy, the president of the Medical 

 Society of the District of Columbia, instituting thereby "The Toner 

 lecture fund." Ninety per cent of the interest of the fund was to be 

 applied for at least two annual memoirs or essays by different indi- 

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