John Shaw Billings and American military medical history

Abstract

We read with interest the article by Neville Goodman, rightly extolling the contributions that John Shaw Billings made to medicine and to medical libraries.¹

To follow Billings’ advice ‘have something to say; say it; stop as soon as you’ve said it’, we would like to clarify the following in order not to ‘originate or perpetrate errors’.

Billings was an American military medical officer who worked for the Army Surgeon General’s Library, which was housed in various buildings in Washington, DC between 1862 and 1962, along with the Army Medical Museum (which later became the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology).^2,3 Billings resigned from the Army in 1895 and died in 1913.^1,2 The phrase ‘After leaving the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda’ is somewhat misleading in reference to Billings’ life’s work as the National Library of Medicine was created by an act of Congress in 1956. The same act also transferred the library to the Public Health Service.² The National Library of Medicine opened in Bethesda, Maryland in 1962.²

Footnotes

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this letter are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.

Declarations

References

Goodman

. John Shaw Billings: creator of Index Medicus and medical visionary. J R Soc Med 2018; 111: 98–102.

A Brief History of NLM. See www.nlm.nih.gov/about/briefhistory.html (last checked 12 April 2018).

Henry RS. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Its First Century 1862-1962. Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1964: 1.