Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, U.S. Army

Abstract

THE saying of Hippocrates, that art is long and time is short, is so true, not merely of medical art, but of work in general, that most working men find their lives gliding so quickly away that they do not attempt great works, and very probably would not succeed if they did so. But every now and then we come across men whose energy is so marvellous, and whose power of getting through work is so enormous, that we are struck with amazement at it. Such a man is Dr. Billings, to whose extraordinary energy and perseverance we owe the present work. This purports to be only a catalogue of the Library of the Office of the Surgeon-General of the United States Army, and Dr. Billings takes care to call attention to the fact that it is not a complete medical bibliography, and that any one who relies upon it as such will commit a serious error. “It is,” he says, “a catalogue of what is to be found in a single collection; a collection so large, and of such a character, that there are few subjects in medicine with regard to which something may not be found in it, but which is by no means complete.” It is not, however, a mere catalogue in the ordinary sense of the word, inasmuch as its contents are not confined to the names and titles of books and their authors. It is also a catalogue of subjects, so that any one wishing to read up a particular subject will find under the appropriate heading a list of the chief works bearing upon it. Nor is this all. There are other catalogues in which a similar arrangement has not only been attempted but successfully carried out. But this catalogue differs from all others inasmuch as it is the only compilation in which the herculean task of arranging in proper order the contents, not only of books, but of medical periodicals, has ever been essayed. To any person who is aware of the enormous extent of medical periodical literature, and who has had personal experience of the time and labour involved in looking up a few references, it seems almost incredible that any man should have had the courage to venture upon the task which Dr. Billings has successfully accomplished. To give the faintest idea of the work, we take a single heading—Amputation, and we find, besides a large number of works and references under this title itself, several other headings on the treatment of amputation, cases and statistics of amputation, double amputation, history of amputation, intra-uterine amputation, methods of amputation, multiple amputation, sequelæ and after treatment of amputation, spontaneous amputation, amputation in the course of disease, amputation in gunshot wounds, amputation in infants, amputation in joints, amputation in pregnancy, carpal and metacarpal amputations, tarsal and meta-tarsal amputation, amputations at ankle-joint, amputations of arm, amputations of breast, amputations at elbow-joint, amputations of fingers and toes, amputations of foot, amputations of fore-arm, amputations of hip-joint, amputations of knee-joint, amputations of leg, amputations at shoulder-joint, amputations of thigh, amputations of toes, amputations at wrist-joint, besides cross references to Amputation considered under other heads, such as Gangrene, Hospitals; Surgery, Umbilical Cord, Arteries, Limbs, Osteomyelitis, Spinal Cord, Stumps, Frost-bite, Pregnancy, Pyæmia, Elbow-joint, Breast, Tibia, Ankle-joint, Astragalus, Aneurisms, Arm, Artery, Humerus, &c. On taking a single one of these headings, we find under it nineteen books, and on then attempting to count the references to periodical literature we go along until we come to the end of the letter C, and then stop in despair, for we have already got a hundred references, and find that to proceed to the end of the alphabet will be a work of both time and labour. The wearisomeness of counting the number of references in a small fraction of one sub-head may give the reader some notion of the labour involved in hunting out and writing down the materials, and yet, after all, such idea would be very imperfect, for the labours of Dr. Billings and his assistants have not consisted merely in giving these references. A much greater amount of time and trouble has probably been consumed in the consideration of what should be left out than by the labour of arranging and compiling what should be put in, for in indexing journals and transactions the general rule which they have followed has been that only original articles should be taken, though occasionally important papers in several periodicals, and reprints when the originals have not been in the library, have been indexed. In describing the arrangement of the book we cannot do better than quote Dr. Billings' own words:—

Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, U.S. Army.

Vol. i., A—Berliúski. 410, pp. 888. (Washington: Government Printing Office.)