Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, US Army

Abstract

THE masterly way in which Mr. J. S. Billings is conducting this Index-Catalogue, and publishing punctually year by year these large volumes of about a thousand closely-packed pages, is a matter worth the attention not only of all interested in medicine and surgery, but also of all interested in modern libraries and modern journalistic literature. For the Library of the Office of General Robert Murray, Surgeon-General of the U.S. Army, though only founded in 1830, is now one of the largest collections of medical literature in the world, larger possibly than that of the British Museum, of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, or the collections of Berlin or Vienna, and it contains some manuscripts, notably a letter of Edward Jenner's, which the English librarians would be glad to have. Its catalogue is certainly much more complete, as far as it has been published, in spite of the method of execution having been much more difficult. For these seven volumes that have been hitherto published contain more than 254,000 references to articles or essays in journals and periodicals of all kinds and in all languages, arranged under the subjects to which they refer. The French and German pleasure in framing appended bibliographies on the subjects of some monographs which they publish has never given them courage enough to face such a Herculean task. The number of periodicals which either have been or are being taken in by the Library has risen since last year, when vol. vi. was published, from 3005 to 3270, and extends through a wide geographical range, from the Norsk Magazin of Christiania, to the Klin-le I-letzu (the Modern Medical News) of Yedo; and in wide range of interest from the Revue des deux Mondes, to the Dental Luminary of Macon, Ga., U.S. The learned compilers of the Index-Catalogue are good enough always to translate the Japanese titles when they print them in English letters; indeed they sometimes go further, and, avoiding the difficulty of even transliterating them, give us merely the title in English, with a warning note that the original title is Japanese. Magyar is also as a rule, though not by any means always, translated; Polish sometimes, Russian only occasionally. The whole method of the book is so perfectly orderly and symmetrical, that it makes us wonder whether this want of rule in translation is one of the trifling points in which the individualism of Mr. Billings' assistants has crept in; for we cannot see that the translated titles are in any way more difficult than the untranslated.

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

Vol. VII. Insignarès-Leghorn, pp. [100] and 959. (Washington: Government Printing Offices, 1886.)