Biographical memoir of John Shaw Billings, 1838-1913 / by S. Weir Mitchell; with The scientific work of John Shaw Billings by Fielding H. Garrison. Presented to the Academy at the annual meeting, 1916.

  • Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir), 1829-1914.
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Biographical memoir of John Shaw Billings, 1838-1913 / by S. Weir Mitchell; with The scientific work of John Shaw Billings by Fielding H. Garrison. Presented to the Academy at the annual meeting, 1916. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    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 to prepare a comprehensive index which should spare medical teachers and writers the drudgery of consulting thou¬ sands 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 possession. When he took hold of this work the Surgeon-General’s library con¬ tained a little over a thousand volumes and all interest in its increase had been long at an end. Fortunately, as I so under¬ stand, at the close of the war there fell into the hands of the Surgeon-General some eighty-five thousand dollars, the result of hospital savings 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 possess. When he was nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences his claim to this high distinction was judiciously founded by his friends upon his application of skill in the scientific classification of books and of the medical knowledge 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 scien¬ tific classification of knowledge so as to make it readily avail¬ able. It was eminently a scientific gift and of incredible use¬ fulness 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 received from the physicians of Great Britain and America at a dinner given in his honor a silver box containing a check for ten thousand dollars, as a material expression of gratitude for the labor-saving value of his catalogue.