Librarians also have a place in medicine

Commentary. By Edward Morman, PhD, AMNews contributor. Feb. 25, 2002.

The inventiveness of American librarianship is a frequently overlooked facet of the genius of our culture. We produced the Dewey decimal system; we contributed to the development of the card catalog; and our public libraries have been an inspiration to the world.

American medical libraries and librarians stand out as particularly important. Before 1879 there existed no periodical index to current medical literature. Index Medicus began publication that year as a project of John Shaw Billings and an Army Medical Library colleague, Robert Fletcher.

By the time the first issue of Index Medicus appeared, Billings and Fletcher had already devoted years of effort to the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, U.S. Army, volume one of which came out in 1880. Not unusual for a printed library catalog of that period, it listed books by author and subject, and also (by subject, in miniscule six-point type) "all important original articles in medical periodicals and transactions of all countries." The first series was completed with volume 16 in 1895, and Billings's successors had to start immediately with a second series documenting the library's acquisitions of the decade and half that had passed since publication started. [...]