Country： America Type： library
Tag： Medical Science
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The National Library of Medicine was founded in 1836 as a small collection of medical books and journals in the office of the Director of the United States Army Medical Service. Before transferring the collection to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1962, it was stored in the following locations:
The Riggs Bank Building located on 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue (1862-1866)
Ford Theater located at 513 Northwest 10th Street (1866-1887)
(1887-1962) Army Medical Museum and Library Building, located southwest of 7th Street and Independence Avenue
Office of the Director of the Army Medical Bureau, located throughout downtown Washington, D.C
The National Library of Medicine in the United States was initially small, consisting of only a few books from the Army Medical Office. In 1836, the first library funding application appeared in the expenditure estimate of the Military Medical Office - to purchase medical books for $150. In 1840, the office released the first "Library Book Catalog". As historian Wyndham D. Miles pointed out in his 1982 NLM history, "the entire collection (as listed in the 1840 catalog) can be placed on a four story bookshelf, shoulder height, 7 or 8 feet wide." Although the collection continued to increase under the leadership of Thomas Lawson, who served as the director of the Department of Health from 1836 to 1861, if we accept the evaluation of Joseph J. Woodward, who served in the office of the director of the Department of Health from 1862 to 1864, the collection remains insignificant and disorganized: "There was nothing worth calling a medical library in Washington during the late stages of the Civil War.
In 1862, the Director of Health Library relocated to the Riggs Bank building on 15th Street and Pennsylvania Street in northwest Washington, D.C. The library issued its first printed catalog in 1864, listing approximately 2100 books. One year later, with the closure of the Army Temporary Civil War Hospital and the merger of its library, the office of the Director of Health unexpectedly harvested a large number of medical books and journals.
In January 1865, the army summoned Lieutenant John Shaw Billings, a 27 year old surgeon and book enthusiast, to manage the growing collection of books. His appointment marked a turning point in the development of the library. Within six years, the library's collection reached 13000 books, and by 1873, the collection had reached 25000 books and 15000 booklets. By 1880, the number of books had doubled to 50000, and the number of booklets had tripled to 60000.
Billings is an enthusiastic book collector who wrote letters to doctors, librarians, and editors requesting them to donate books, and even talked to State Department officials requesting them to bring back foreign medical works when traveling abroad. Before resigning from the military in 1895, Billings had already transformed his collection into the world's largest medical library, covering medical literature from almost all eras and countries. In 1895, the library's collection included 116847 books and 191598 booklets.
John Shaw Billings has helped plan the direction of development for the National Library of Medicine in many ways. At the end of his term, encouraged by him, books and journals were regularly lent to doctors, and thousands of reference consultations were answered each year.
On April 14, 1865, US President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a performance of "Our American Cousin" at the Ford Theater. The public strongly protested against the further performance of the play, so the government took over the theater and bought it the following year as a collection of army medical records, museums, and libraries. The library collection was stored in the Ford Theater for several years, and the first eight volumes of the index catalog were published. This masterpiece was released in 1880 and is the culmination of John Shaw Billings' hard work. It is a comprehensive catalog of authors and themes for the library's growing collection of monographs and journals. William Welch, a renowned pathology professor and the first dean of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (1850-1934), called the Index Catalog the greatest contribution of the United States to 19th-century medicine.
The Ford Theater era was a period of rapid development and transformation for the Director of Health Library. The ambitious spirit began to sprout, and as early as 1871, the health chiefs Joseph K. Barnes and Billings began planning to develop the collection into the "National Library of Medicine". For Barnes, this means that the library will contain "every medical book published in this country and every work related to public health and state medicine," in Billings' words, "covering as fully as possible all publications related to military organizations, medicine, and related sciences," and will become "a universal reference library. So far, army doctors, passing tourists walking up to the third floor of Ford Theater, and people who have heard of this library through word of mouth all know about it. Now, Billings is promoting the existence of this library to the American medical community and will develop it for use by all doctors.
In 1879, Billings began compiling the first comprehensive journal article index, the Medical Index. The inspiration for this index came from his own experience: when writing papers about epilepsy, he was frustrated by the lack of thematic indexing in medical literature. The online database MEDLINE of NLM is the electronic version of this publication. MEDLINE contains over 14 million references dating back to the mid-1950s.
From 1887 to 1962, the United States Medical Service Library (officially renamed the Army Medical Library in 1922) was located in this three story red brick building designed by Billings, along with its sister institution, the Army Medical Museum. Inspired by Billings' vision of becoming a great national institution, the Hirshhorn Museum is now located on its original site in Washington Square. The library has begun to provide expanded services to meet the information needs of healthcare professionals. By the 1880s, books and journals were regularly lent to doctors across the country, and with the advancement of technology, microfilm and photocopying of documents also emerged. During this period, the historical collection significantly increased and was transported to Cleveland, Ohio for safekeeping during World War II. The library also took the first step of the computer age at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Independence Avenue, launching a mechanized publishing system in 1958.
In 1962, the new National Library of Medicine was completed on the NIH campus, located on a former golf course forest. The building aims to protect the collection from potential Cold War threats, featuring a one foot thick limestone wall, over 50 miles of underground bookshelves, and a foldable roof. The computer age flourished here, with the establishment of Lister Hill National Biomedical Communication Center in 1968, MEDLINE in the 1970s, National Biotechnology Information Center in 1988, free MEDLINE in 1997, consumer friendly MedlinePlus in 1998, ClinicalTrials.gov and PubMed Central in 2000, and other developments. At the same time, the number of collections has increased sharply, and the number of requests for interlibrary loans has also increased accordingly. NLM is currently collaborating with over 20 countries and expanding its promotion efforts to global consumers and healthcare professionals.